Nothing to do with the Plan
by LysandraLeigh
Summary: Too many things happen in the summer of 1994. (A pseudo-sequel of All According to Plan, a collaboration between LeighaGreene and inwardtransience)
1. Is smaoineamh uafásach é seo

_This fic is a collaboration between LeighaGreene and inwardtransience. It's also a kinda-sorta sequel to All According to Plan, so if you haven't read that you'll be very confused._

* * *

Holding in her exasperation at the door being opened for her, Síomha stepped up out of the car, took a glance at her surroundings.

And jerked to a halt. "You're kidding me."

The man still holding the door open — a boy, really, looking almost uncomfortable in the stiff suit he'd been stuffed into, had to be an intern or something — blinked at her for a second. "I'm sorry, ma'am?"

Ugh, English, right. "That's the Government Buildings," she said, gesturing around at the sprawling edifice of marble and iron in all directions. She'd been driven right into the courtyard in the middle, so she really was surrounded, tall walls of off-white stone, complete with Roman-style pillars because of course there were, carvings of who even knew what every few metres, the courtyard itself with trees and parked government cars, a few people wandering across here and there, a great bloody fountain, echoing in the relative silence of the courtyard, the wings of the structure enough to cut out the usual noise of Dublin somewhat.

Didn't do much to cut out the noise in her head, of course, but she felt that was bloody well called for! What the fuck was she _doing_ here?

The boy gave her a baffled sort of look. "Did...nobody tell you where to they were bringing you?"

"No, I had fun with her, sure." That was Donnacha, coming around the intimidating black monstrosity she'd been brought here in to shoot her a crooked smirk. "Can't blame me for that — it's a drudgerous thing, government work, you take what pleasure you can."

Síomha couldn't help glaring at the irritating muggle a little. Falling back into Gaelic, "You're a cunt, Donnacha, you know that." Also, she was pretty sure _drudgerous_ wasn't even a real word.

It had been a peculiar, unnecessarily mysterious process all told, this whole thing, whatever it was. Which wasn't _too_ much of a surprise, anything to do with how the muggles and mages of Ireland interacted always got a _little_ peculiar. Technically, the Ministry in London was supposed to handle whatever official liaising with the muggle government was necessary, but the Republic of Ireland splitting off from the United Kingdom some decades ago now had...complicated matters, to say the least. While they'd already had laws and procedure in place to deal with the British Crown and the French Republic from practically the beginning, a new state appearing in the middle of their territory was a new one. Given how recent a development it was, by magical standards, and...

While, _technically_, the magical government recognised the independence of muggle Ireland, and thus _technically_ had the same responsibilities to them they had to the Crown..._practically_ speaking, it was a bit of a mess. The Ministry tended to completely ignore the Republic, acted throughout the island as though the national border didn't exist.

Which complicated things, somewhat, especially when it came to legal issues involving people actually living in Éire. Especially, say, purebloods, who wanted anything to do with muggle society for whatever reason, so needed some way to legitimise their existence — with, say, official documents, birth certificates and passports and such. A cousin of Síomha's had been arrested by muggle Italian authorities because, in their infinite stupidity, the Ministry had arranged papers issued by the British government for a woman born in Corcaigh _in the fifties_. Bloody idiots.

These days, Saoirse Ghaelach stepped in to fill the gaps, whenever they could get away with it. They had a few contacts in the government, mostly in the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of the Gaeltacht — the Irish government sort of considered the magical community within their territory to be one big Gaeltacht — through which they helped people settle whatever issues they had...again, whenever they could get away with it. What they were doing was, _technically_, illegal, both under British law and international Secrecy. But until the Ministry got their heads out of their collective arses, Síomha really didn't see how Gaelic mages could be expected to do any differently.

That they were slowly creating parallel institutions that didn't involve the British Ministry at all was really just a side benefit.

Anyway, a letter had come for her, passing through several hands — someone in Foreign Affairs to a muggle in the know in Cárna, to his contact in Saoirse, to Clíodhna, and finally to Síomha. The letter itself had been rather vague, boiling down to Foreign Affairs wanting a consultation on...something, if she'd please show up at such-and-such place at this time a driver will pick her up and bring her to the meeting, blah blah. It hadn't said who she'd be meeting with, or where. Some low-level diplomats, she'd assumed, maybe one of the Ministers of State.

She hadn't thought it was out of the question that she'd be being dragged to Iveagh House and shoved into a meeting with the Tánaiste, but that was the most extreme possibility, the thought was a bit absurd. After all, the Republic of Ireland should probably avoid holding high-level meetings with Gaelic nationalist separatists, even magical ones. Might give the English the wrong idea, what with the...situation in the North right now, you see.

But to be brought here... "I swear, Donnacha, if the Taoiseach is at this meeting and you didn't tell me..."

"What, you'll curse me?" The aggravating man shrugged, drawled, "Like I haven't heard _that_ before. Besides, what would you have done differently?"

"I would have worn something else, for one thing!"

"And I'm supposedly to believe you care?"

"It's generally not considered appropriate to be _having meetings_ with _heads of government_ in _jeans!_" Honestly, it would have taken her five minutes to apparate back and dress properly...

"Calm down, I didn't say anything about the Taoiseach being there." That sort of condescension on Donnacha's voice would have been annoying on anyone, but from some muggle paper-pusher it was just _insufferable_. Luckily, the boy's blank look of confusion (he clearly didn't speak Gaelic) was amusing enough of a distraction — she _really_ shouldn't go hexing muggles in public. "If you're quite done already, we _do_ have somewhere to be."

Síomha forced out a sigh, trying to vent her building irritation and wariness with her breath. It didn't work very well. "All right, fine. Let's go, then."

Going inside the building wasn't making Síomha any _less_ uncomfortable. She just... Okay, it was a _nice_ building, that wasn't in doubt — it was the last public building commissioned in Éire by the Empire, she recalled (as a university? she thought?), and currently hosted the main offices of the head of government of an entire bloody country, it'd be weird if it _wasn't_ pretty. On the inside everything was clean and bright, old marble and pale polished wood contrasted with gleaming modern furnishings, paintings bloody everywhere, there was fucking _stained glass_ over the stairs at the entry. The inside was weirdly quiet, actually — there were a few people bustling about, but _far_ fewer than she would think. It was getting on in the afternoon, true, but there should still be...

Anyway, the feeling she couldn't shake, that she _shouldn't be here_, it only got stronger the deeper she was led into the lavish building. Not necessarily _because_ of the extravagance, though that was sort of foreign itself. Gaelic society wasn't prone to the pointless luxury the English often were — probably the closest things to this sort of physical wealth on the magical side of Éire or Alba she could think of were Hogwarts (which had been built by Britons in the first place) and the seat of the Inghams (which was actually somewhat modest, compared to other Ancient Houses). But no, that wasn't it, not really. Her concerns were largely political.

She was well aware the current situation between the Gaels and the Brits of the Celtic Nations was...complicated. And by _complicated_, she meant it was all too possible tensions could explode into civil war, if things go just the right kind of badly. And a civil war between the two major constituent cultures in their little magical nation would be _very_ messy. Especially given the intermarriage and general cultural diffusion that had been going on increasingly over the last few centuries — there were areas of the country where the distinction between Gael and Brit simply wasn't so clear as it seemed in Éire. It was..._fuzzy_, and if it _did_ break out into general war — which she didn't think likely, she feared the Ministry would just crush Saoirse, who were handily outnumbered by even just DLE officers, and call it done with — nobody could be entirely certain where the lines would be drawn.

People thought Voldemort's war had been bad — families splitting apart, brother fighting brother and so forth. But the Death Eaters had mostly been nobility, pulling from a comparatively small number of families. In a true war between the Gaels and the Brits, they could see much the same dynamic, but far more extensive, spreading all through the commons. It would be nothing short of a disaster.

And if the Ministry knew Saoirse was meeting with muggle officials in the _bloody Government Buildings_...

And that wasn't even getting in to things on the muggle side, which were perhaps equally complicated. When the Republic had split off, a few of the northern counties, about two-thirds of Ulaidh, had elected to remain with the Empire. To put it mildly, the drawing of a national border across Éire had been a controversial decision since the moment pen was put to paper. Things had been relatively quiet at first, but tensions had gradually escalated over the decades, until there were riots and shoot-outs in the streets, snipers and bombings. Hell, the nationalists even tried to assassinate the English Prime Minister which...was _insane_, but had to admire the stones those boys had, she guessed.

The violence in the North wasn't overwhelming, but it _was_ certainly... She meant, London _had_ to be watching Dublin for signs that they were supporting the nationalists in Ulaidh, waiting for any sign that this was more than a domestic conflict. Tensions between the English and Irish governments hadn't been this fragile since shortly after independence. Saoirse wasn't..._directly_ involved with muggle republicans in Ulaidh — at least, if they were Síomha didn't know about it — but it wasn't out of the question that London would take the Republic meeting with Gaelic nationalists very, _very_ badly.

She didn't think something so small would be enough to spark off a war. But it could _certainly_ escalate into the sort of diplomatic crisis the muggles of Éire hadn't seen since...well, ever, really.

Síomha couldn't help the feeling _somebody_ was making a terrible mistake.

That feeling only got worse when Donnacha lead her into a conference room. It was a rather nice place, all deep blue carpets and gleaming polished wood, despite the modern muggle trend toward simplicity still far richer than...well, most anywhere she'd ever been. There were far fewer people than one might expect would call for meeting in a room this size — excluding her and Donnacha, they only numbered five. Even at a glance, most of the faces in the room were familiar, but one stuck out immediately: an older man, hair thinning and greyed, but face comparatively smooth and round, would seem almost..._jolly_, if not for the idle frown. She'd never met the man, but she didn't need to be told who it was to recognise him.

Barnie Craig, the bloody _Taoiseach_ of the fucking _Republic_.

Before introductions could even get going, Síomha jerked to a halt in the doorway. "Oh, you're kidding me, this is a terrible idea."

She got a scattering of confused looks from the dignitaries in the room — she also spotted the Tánaiste, the Minister for Arts, Culture, and the Gaeltacht, and Síomha was pretty sure that was the ambassador to England, for some reason. Likely, most of them didn't speak Gaelic, it was rare among muggles these days, so it was Donnacha who spoke first. "Come, Síomha, don't make a scene now."

Turning to glare at him, she hissed, "You explicitly told me _two minutes ago_ that the Taoiseach _wouldn't be at this meeting!"_

Donnacha shrugged. "I lied."

One day, she was going to murder this man. She just knew it. Forcing out a heavy sigh for a moment, Síomha's eyes tipped up to the ceiling, trying to gather herself before turning back to _the bloody Taoiseach_. Switching to English, "I apologise, _a Thaoisigh_, I'm..." Síomha flailed for a moment, grasping for an appropriate word. "...flattered, but, I _really_ shouldn't be here."

_The bloody Taoiseach_ cocked an eyebrow at her. "I can't imagine why not, but you'll go on telling me, sure."

"With the difficulties in the North right now, you probably don't want the fact that you're meeting with anyone from the leadership of Saoirse to get back to the English. Or the Ministry, for that matter."

"That's funny, and here I thought you're an Irish citizen. Mike, am I having another moment," he said, turning toward Mícheál Ó Caoimháin, _the bloody Tánaiste_, "or am I still allowed to talk to my own damn people?"

A rather younger man, thinner and taller, dressed rather more casually, forsaking the standard suit muggles usually stuck with for what looked like a bloody _polo shirt_ — it couldn't possibly be, they were in the _bloody Government Buildings_ in a meeting with the _fucking Taoiseach_, Síomha might just be behind on muggle fashion — Mícheál's sharp face pulled into a crooked smirk. "Last I checked in, there's no law against that."

"It's not really about whether it's _legal_ or—"

"Oh, quit you that whinging and sit your arse down, will you? We have too much talk about to waste time arguing over whether we should talk at all."

Did... Did the Taoiseach just tell her to _stop whinging_? She didn't...

Oh, this was a _terrible_ idea.

A quick round of introductions followed. The Minister of Arts was the only person in the room (besides Donnacha, of course) whom she'd actually met before — Máire Ní Súileabháin, a dark-haired woman in her forties, whose soft smile and naturally sardonic drawl invariably put Síomha in mind of her more entertaining great-aunt. She'd correctly identified the older gentleman — the word felt appropriate, the well-dressed man had a sort of calm, noble gravity to him, it was hard to explain — as the Republic's ambassador to England, Jack Nerry. (Síomha was slightly dumbfounded at the peculiar name, but nobody corrected Donnacha, must be right.) Nerry also doubled as their primary contact with the Ministry, since he spent most of his time in London anyway. The last person present, a younger man sitting in the corner prodding at...a PDA, Síomha thought those were called, and scribbling on a notebook was presumably an assistant of some kind, he wasn't introduced.

There was a bit of awkwardness around the names, because Irish muggles didn't actually use Gaelic anymore. The Tánaiste actually went by Mike Cavan — which, that wasn't how Caomhán was supposed to be pronounced, but okay — and Síomha did a double-take when Máire was introduced as Mary O'Sullivan — that was _closer_ to correct, never mind that it made her sound like _a man_. At least Síomha's name was relatively easy to pronounce, from an English perspective, but she couldn't quite hold in a wince when Nerry called her "Madam Ailbhe" — _that_ was just _bloody weird_.

Gaelic mages never had quite caught on to the surname thing, at least not in the commons; she did technically have one, of course, but it was more accurately a clanname, it wasn't something that was used in direct address, that just felt _strange_. (Not to mention, the ní was sort of important, and he'd also pronounced Ailbhe wrong.) _Everyone_ just called her Síomha, even in formal situations, _maybe_ Síomha Raghnaill if there was another Síomha around and they needed to be more specific. As uncomfortable as she already was with _everything_ about this, calling her _strange_ things was just making her more anxious.

(This wasn't right, she shouldn't be here.)

It took repeating it a couple times, but she did manage to convince them all that, yes, it really was appropriate to just call her by her first name. She'd have to try to remember to properly use titles and such, she'd probably slip if she didn't. English was so damn annoying sometimes.

"So, we're all friends now, how nice. If we can get to the bloody point sometime today, I do have places to be." It sounded bitter enough, but there was the hint of a smirk in the Taoiseach's eyes. Apparently he just talked like this, which...Síomha _had_ heard, she just hadn't realised people were serious about that. Okay then. "Mike, you have it on you?"

"I have." The Tánaiste reached into a pocket, and pulled out...a sheet of parchment. "This letter here was sent to the President, a couple months ago now — a bloody owl brought it, because sure, why not. His wife hadn't even known about magic, I'm told, he had some uncomfortable explaining there. Anyway, we here have all read it now, and we called you in to answer some questions." He unfolded the parchment, and tossed it across the table to fall in front of her. Throwing a confused glance back at Donnacha, Síomha spun it around rightside-up, started reading.

And stopped immediately. "This is in Gaelic."

"They noticed, Síomha," Máire said, smiling a little. "Go on, read."

Okay, sure, they obviously would have noticed it was written in Gaelic, but she was going to go out on a limb and guess she was the only person in the room who had any idea how _strange_ that was. Gaelic was still _far_ more common on the magical side than it was in muggle Éire — it was the dominant language in Éire and most of Alba, in fact — but it was hardly used for _official_ purposes anymore. And not usually by the sort of people who still used bloody _parchment_. The idea of somebody writing a letter to the President of the Republic in Gaelic on parchment was just strange.

Though, it quickly became clear the author didn't actually speak Gaelic. It was passable, but awkward, accomplished either through liberal use of references or an advanced translation charm. Which wasn't a surprise — the Blacks weren't a Gaelic family, it was very possible this Lady Black, or whoever had written this in her name, would have been more comfortable in British. (Síomha spoke British — that is, Cymraeg — too, but this hadn't been written for her.) She would think it a little odd that she'd put the effort in to use Gaelic when they could have used English just as well, but maybe they simply thought it was the proper thing to do.

She _did_ use the proper address and everything, _a Shoilse_ dotted here and there across the page. Most actual Gaels didn't bother, even the muggles. Which was _weird_, but, judging from the very little she'd heard of this Lyra Black girl, weird was simply to be expected.

Of course, that wasn't even getting into the contents, which were another whole level of absurd. "You have confirmed this invitation is legitimate with the British Ministry? Only, this Lady Black is just fourteen, I think." Síomha didn't point out that that didn't actually matter — she _was_ a Lady of the Wizengamot, she had the power to invite dignitaries to state-sponsored events if she wanted to. But Celtic law was bloody strange sometimes, there was no point talking about it.

"I did, naturally, first thing after I was informed." This was Nerry — his voice was a low, smooth rumble, without the hint of Gaelic on his accent the other muggles in the room had, sounding very English. "In fact, I spoke to their Director of International Cooperation directly, at his office in London. According to Crouch, it had not originally occurred to them that, under the terms of the Nineteen-Thirteen Treaty of Anglesey, our magical counterparts are required to at the very least offer us the opportunity to represent ourselves at such diplomatic events as this Tournament. They might have forgotten entirely if Lady Black hadn't taken it upon herself to invite us. The Queen received an identical letter, I'm told — though, hers was in English, of course."

"But..." Okay, now that she thought about it, that was probably true — the sovereignty question when it came to parallel magical and muggle states occupying the same land had been complicated from the beginning, and the Statute had only made the situation _more_ fraught with contradictions and technicalities and pitfalls than it'd been before. It very well might be that they'd simply forgotten at some point that they were obligated to invite each other to major diplomatic events. As small and isolated as the Celtic Nations were, the Triwizard Tournament qualified. (Which might seem silly to muggle eyes, but it was what it was.) "But the Republic didn't even exist in Nineteen-Thirteen."

"No, but the treaty was renegotiated under the old Free State in 'Thirty-Three, shortly after the Statute of Westminster 'Thirty-One. The Ministry do often forget about us over here, but they have the same diplomatic obligations to us they do the United Kingdom. According to Crouch, the invitation is both legitimate and, in fact, statutory necessity."

"It's not the legitimacy of the invitation that's the problem now." The Tánaiste gave her a crooked, almost rueful smile. "We feel it possible the event might present an opportunity. Not so much where our relations to the magical government are concerned — though, sure, we should use any chance we get to remind the Wizengamot and the Ministry that we _exist_. As much as we do appreciate the efforts of organisations like yours, and sympathise with your goals, strengthening ties with the official magical government is in our best interests."

"Oh, I don't disagree, _a Thánaiste_, you do what you have to." If the Republic _did_ switch entirely to proper legal channels with the Ministry it _would_ weaken the position of Saoirse, Síomha knew that, but she couldn't reasonably expect them to prioritise the health of a subversive separatist group they technically had nothing to do with over their own national interests. Not that she thought it _likely_ they'd ever succeed in getting the Wizengamot to take them seriously — from what she could tell, most of the Lords thought the whole of Éire was still a British colony, it was frustrating — but she couldn't blame them for trying.

The Taoiseach snorted. "_So_ happy we have your approval."

"Yes, well, that aside," the Tánaiste said, shooting his superior a slightly exasperated look, "the opportunity is more than that. We've gotten word already that Downing Street intends to send their own delegation. We don't yet know who exactly will be in it, sure, but I think it could be a good opportunity to have talks under the table, so to speak."

"I understand." He meant so they could frankly address the Northern Ireland situation somewhere they didn't have to worry about appearances or politics — whatever they said, or even that they were meeting at all, was hardly likely to get back to the muggle population in Ireland or Britain. The magical press probably wouldn't even think to comment on it. Things had only gotten more difficult, with nationalists nearly assassinating the bloody Prime Minister, and trust between the muggle governments was low, what with select members of the Dáil caught funnelling arms to nationalists militias, the Department of Defence's emergency plans to invade the North if deemed necessary leaked, accusations of British security forces collaborating with loyalist militias, and...

Well, it was very possible being able to figure some things out where the muggle press couldn't barge in and make a nuisance of themselves might prove critical in any peace process. That wouldn't be _impossible_ to pull off on their own, but hiding away behind the wards of Hogwarts was a neat trick.

"Yes, I can see why that might be useful. What did you want to hear from me?" As the Taoiseach had pointed out a moment ago, they hardly needed her advice to put that idea together themselves.

The Tánaiste smirked. "Frankly put, Síomha, we need to know how likely it is our people will be murdered during their stay with the mages."

...Síomha would _like_ to be able to say there was absolutely no risk of that, but she'd be lying.

This whole blood purity thing, no matter how much the so-called purebloods would protest, was a relatively new concept in their sociopolitical culture. It hadn't really existed at all before the Statute, at the end of the Seventeenth Century — at least, not in any form modern people would recognise it — and it hadn't developed to a point it was generating racial discrimination and even violence until... Well, the first blood laws against muggleborns (or halfbloods, sometimes) holding certain offices in the Ministry weren't passed until the 1820s, and while there had been the occasional hate crime here and there, the Death Eaters truly were the first organised campaign of violence against those declared impure.

There was a reason the Death Eaters had been opposed by most legitimate conservative voices in Celtic magical society: the golden age they claimed they were attempting to restore, their vision of a pure Britain, was a complete fantasy, something that had never existed before and likely never would. When they'd been the Knights of Walpurgis, they'd had far better luck finding like-thinking people among the Dark, but once they'd started drifting into pureblood nationalist insanity...

But, the point was, as much as Dumbledore and his ilk tried to pretend otherwise, the conflict wasn't truly over. If anything, magical society was only _more_ strongly radicalised into the utopian ideology of blood purity than it'd been before — even many prominent figures _in Dumbledore's own administration_ openly displayed their racism, though of course without the genocidal rhetoric. Discriminatory views about muggleborns were now the norm in British government, and increasingly in all relevant social institutions.

Quite honestly, Síomha was worried. Before the rise of Voldemort, a rather chauvinist attitude about muggleborns had been common — annoying, yes, but not particularly dangerous. But he'd managed to tap into visceral fears laid by Grindelwald's revolution on the Continent, tainting Celtic society with the feeling that muggleborns were not only different, but somehow less civilised, less human than the rest of them, and _dangerous_. Seriously problematic ideas about blood purity were _more_ common than they'd been before, not less, it was _everywhere_. And the Death Eaters hadn't been dismantled, they still existed. Only a tiny minority had been killed or thrown in Azkaban to rot, the vast majority still walked free, with no real limits on their activities, some even stood in positions of power and influence. When the ceasefire ended — and this _was_ simply a ceasefire, the war _wasn't over_ — these were developments and positions the Death Eaters would exploit.

Síomha hadn't had anything to do with the war last time — she'd been, what, twelve or thirteen when it'd ended, and it'd hardly touched Éire in any case, mostly a British conflict. She had the feeling that she, all of Saoirse, would get drawn into it, and soon. And it would be _messy_, far worse than last time. There was something viscerally horrifying about racial violence, in a way ordinary war simply couldn't touch, and the renewed conflict would be bigger and bloodier than it'd been in the 70s, she just knew it.

Part of her couldn't help the thought that that wasn't even a bad thing. At least they could eliminate the worst of the British nationalists properly this time, and, well, it was very possible Saoirse could exploit the opportunity to drive a wedge between the Gaels and the Brits, and get their own revolution going. But it was definitely going to be messy, and she was...not scared, exactly, but worried, yes. She was starting to get very worried.

But, getting back to the matter at hand, if British mages were less tolerant of muggleborns than ever before it went without saying they'd react even _worse_ to muggles showing up — especially at bloody _Hogwarts_, of all places. "There shouldn't be any threat of treachery from the Ministry or the school administration, but... Well, they're Nazis, basically, there are far too many magical Nazis about. I'm not sure I would even trust any security they provide — while the _leadership_ of the Ministry is moderate enough to not be genocidal in their racist idiocy, I can't guarantee the same about whoever they assign to guard you. It might have been a good opportunity but, yes, there is a very real risk of your people being murdered. That's just the state of Britain at the moment, I'm afraid."

"Yes, we thought that might be the case."

Síomha turned to blink at the Taoiseach, taking in the resigned, exasperated, but almost intensely solemn looks on all their faces. "Er... I'm sorry, _a Thaoisigh_, but if you knew that already, why was I called here?"

It was Máire who answered — though, it wasn't an answer, really, seemed more a change of subject than anything. "As I understand it, Saoirse Ghaelach has been recruiting and training your own security forces for some years now."

"Sure, if you can call it that." The ultimate goal, of course, was to raise a militia for when it finally came time to succede, but they'd already seen some use as police, essentially, neutral arbiters to mediate conflicts between clans who would rather not call in the British, and as a sort of personal security for Saoirse in general and sometimes the leadership...in particular...when they... "Wait a second..."

"I've been lead to believe Saoirse is very liberal, on the whole blood purity issue."

"Well, yes, I suppose." Technically, they didn't take a position on pureblood supremacy at all — they were primarily concerned with the right of the Gaelic people to rule their own lives, whether those Gaels had magical parents and how far back didn't enter into the equation at all. Many of the muggleborn rights activists themselves did take issue with how they simply ignored the subject, but she guessed it was a matter of perspective. But their people certainly weren't about to go murdering muggles for the hell of it, which was what Máire was really asking. "But, no, you can't be asking us to—"

"We sure as hell can." The Taoiseach, somehow, managed to say that flatly and reasonably, as though what he was saying wasn't _completely insane_.

"But that doesn't— That is a bad idea. That is a _terrible_ idea. Do you have any idea how the Ministry will react when you show up with bodyguards pulled from a _nationalist militia?_ Are you _trying_ to start a huge bloody scandal?"

And the Taoiseach bloody _smirked_. "Maybe a little bit."

Before Síomha could possibly think of how she was supposed to respond to _that_, the Tánaiste picked it up. "If we do wish to exploit this opportunity to meet with British representatives in secret, your people present the only option. It's unfortunate, but there sure isn't any other group operating on the magical side we've ever heard of that we can trust."

"Well, _maybe_, but..."

"And it sends a message, now. Even British relations with the mages have broken down some, I've heard, but it's hard to get them to even acknowledge an independent Ireland _exists_, much of the time."

Nerry gave a solemn sigh. "Every time I go in to see Crouch or one of his people I'm held up at the door by someone who has apparently never heard of the Republic before. Even Crouch, who is a reasonable chap himself, hadn't realised the full extent of the Ministry's treaty obligations to the Crown, much less us. It's a very real problem."

"Showing up with you, Síomha, is a threat, one we mean to make consciously. Take us seriously or, well, maybe we'll just have to deal with these scary nationalists instead. They sure don't want that to happen, do they? It could work the same way for you as well. From what I've heard, the magical government in Britain doesn't represent the interests of Irish mages nearly as much as it should — it is a power play of sorts, displaying a legitimacy through your association with us your government can't ignore. Sure enough, there's the potential among the Irish as well, raising your profile and prestige, which can only help your organisation."

Síomha didn't bother trying to hold in her glare. "Not if it calls down the Aurors on us."

Lifting one shoulder in a light shrug, the Tánaiste said, "So is the risk all revolutionaries take. I'm sure you understood what you were getting into from the beginning."

Honestly, not really — she'd sort of been raised into...sympathy with Saoirse, if not quite Saoirse itself. She had certainly gone much farther into it than her family did, and she hadn't any illusions about what exactly she was doing. But this wasn't _at all_ the same thing, she wanted to tell them all they were bloody insane, but...

Well, everybody in Saoirse was already sort of insane, when it came down to it.

"Oh," she muttered, "this is a _terrible_ idea."

"I'm sorry?"

_English, Síomha, you're supposed to be speaking English._ "I think I might have lost my mind, but... I can't make this kind of decision on my own. I'll have to bring it back to the council, but I suspect it won't take very long — I can't say for certain, but it's safe to assume you'll have your protection. We're all mad here, you see."

The muggle officials chuckled, but Síomha couldn't quite match their good humour. Part of her couldn't help the feeling that this was a horrible idea, and it was going to end very, very badly. She couldn't say _how_ badly, anything from a diplomatic snafu to a bloody civil war, but...

But she'd already accepted the possibility of _things going badly_ when she'd joined the revolution. At a certain point, one simply must embrace the madness.

Fionn _was_ still going to kill her, of course.

* * *

Síomha — _This is a recurring minor character from my headcanon. The name is pronounced roughly "__**she**__-vuh"._

_Some of the word choices might seem slightly strange in here. When exactly Síomha uses which word has an internal logic to it. But it's not really important to know exactly what that is, just consider it a quirk of the magical Irish nationalists and call it good._

_Also, generally speaking, Síomha prefers to use the Irish names for things. "Taoiseach" and "Tánaiste" are the actual titles for the Irish prime minister and deputy prime minister (the spelling is changed in the vocative, "a Thaoisigh" and "a Thánaiste"). The Irish names for Ulster and Cork both showed up at some point. Dublin, however, doesn't get one — she considers it a thoroughly anglicised city, so uses the local name._

[Barnie Craig] — _If anyone noticed the similarity to Bertie Ahern, Taoiseach 1997-2008, the reference was intentional. They're not meant to be the same person, I just took Ahern as a sort of perverse inspiration. (Quite a character, that guy.) We'll actually be coming up with OCs for all the people in muggle government, because I'm leery of using real people in fiction, for a whole variety of reasons, but the complicated coalitions and political instability around 1992-1997 were taken as inspiration. For anyone who cares, the current government would be a coalition of Fianna Fáil, Labour, and the Democratic Left (irl a similar coalition existed in this period with Fine Gael instead of FF)._

[Cymraeg] — _Welsh in Welsh. Welsh in Irish is "Breatnais", literally British, hence the use of the term here._

_The chapter title literally means "this is a horrible idea" (at least, assuming I didn't fuck up, I don't actually speak Irish). Which pretty much sums it up, doesn't it? There's no way this is going to end well._

_All according to plan. (Mwahaha.)_

_—Lysandra_


	2. Tell me, is it as bad as they say?

Severus frowned at the notes the proctor had taken while administering the Competency examination he had designed. It had, he understood, gone well, for the most part. There were several cases, however, where the student's results had not been one of the _very comprehensive_ list of potential end-points and recommended marks he had provided. Two of them, he was quite certain, were the result of cheating — attempts to correct deviations in their potions by including ingredients they had smuggled in, creating interactions that shouldn't have been possible using the ingredients which had been provided.

This one was, he suspected, an effect of having missed four lines of instruction, skipping negligently from the _first_ time the potion was meant to be left to simmer for two minutes to the _second_ time. Which was a shame, because otherwise the potion had been brewed perfectly competently. Yes, it _had_ exploded in the test-taker's face, but that was a result of following the directions to the letter _after_ unintentionally deviating from them.

If the student had realised that something had gone wrong and made some attempt to correct the mistake, or even simply _stopped_ when they realised they were off track, he might have allowed them a passing written-practical average. If the mistake had resulted in a _subtle _deviation, the signs of an impending explosion sudden, unusual, or non-existent, he might have given them the benefit of the doubt, provided their theory paper was _exceptional_. (Even the best could be laid low by stress and sleep deprivation, and it wasn't as though it was standard practice to tick off or cross out completed instructions — most potioneers, Severus suspected, had learned _that_ lesson in exactly this manner.) But they hadn't been. The signs should have been noticeable for at _least_ five steps before the actual explosion.

He could not in good conscience allow this child a qualification which would indicate to anyone else that they could be trusted to brew a potion competently, even with the instructions right there in front of them. Brewing by following the instructions precisely was _acceptable_. Following the instructions off the edge of a very obvious cliff — demonstrating even less awareness of the consequences of their actions than a _thirteen-year-old Bellatrix Black_ — was _not_.

"_One_," he declared. He suspected that no one who had missed such obvious signs could have achieved better than a four on the written, so that should be sufficient to drag the idiot's average score below the passing threshold. "No, _one-star_," he amended himself, "with an annotation to the effect that the student would stand a decent chance of passing should they retake the exam with more care and attention to the instructions, or if they should happen to grow a brain and a sense of self-preservation over the course of the coming year."

Madam Desmarais, the Examination Administration Coordinating Director for Potions, chuckled, though Severus was only half joking. "Unfortunately, such annotations are disallowed by the examination board. Were they not, our evaluators would doubtless spend twice as long on every exam, expending their vitriol upon the poor children whose work they are obliged to judge, or else showering the rare _correctly completed_ examination with such praise as to turn the head of any sixteen-year-old student.

"Speaking of which, _Monsieur_ Chastain, the _directeur_ for Written Magic, asked me to ask you about, oh, I know I wrote it down..." She shuffled through a stack of papers in the basket which presumably served as her in-box. "Ah, yes. _Madame_ Marchbanks of the British Examination Authority has requested a second opinion in evaluating one student's Runes and Arithmancy competencies." Severus had an unpleasant suspicion that he knew _exactly _where this was going. "'When you speak to _Maître_ Snape, I would be most grateful if you would ask him whether he is familiar with a Hogwarts student by the name of Lyra Black, and his opinion of her scholarship abilities.' Apparently her responses were so advanced as to suggest that she could not possibly have written them herself, despite no evidence or even circumstantial indications of cheating."

Severus groaned. Clearly it had been folly to believe that, even here, hundreds of miles from the latest mess Bellatrix had caused, and Powers only knew how far from the girl herself, that he would be able to achieve some respite from her persistent presence in his life. "_Yes_, I _am_ familiar with Miss Black. It would be difficult, I dare say, to avoid her, as Hogwarts _still_ employs only a single Potions professor," he groused, buying himself a few seconds to consider whether he ought to support the infuriating child being granted her OWLs or not.

On the one hand, it was highly unlikely that Black would be able to trace a failing mark and an accusation of cheating back to an unofficial inquiry made of him by the head of an unrelated department of the ICW's examination authority _in Switzerland_, and it was _sorely _tempting to sabotage the girl in any small way that he could in repayment for the trouble she constantly caused _him_.

On the _other_ hand, there was a slim chance that the infuriating child might decide to leave Hogwarts after achieving her NEWTs, making her at least less _immediately _his problem, and in the meanwhile, if she were in the advanced Runes class, Ashe might be convinced to help him keep the girl too fully occupied to cause any truly catastrophic disasters while at school. Even if she _didn't_ leave the school after her fifth year, he could _probably _convince Ashe to help Bellatrix design a Mastery project sufficiently complex to keep her distracted for another year or two. Especially if he told her that Bellatrix had actually implemented a successful solution to the ridiculous theoretical problem Dumbledore had posed to Ashe last week. (As part of a _prank_, on _Sybil_.)

"I understand that there may be some educational reforms in the works which would correct that issue. _Directeur_ Zabini's department has been in contact with her counterpart here for several months seeking advice on implementing a system more similar to ours."

So, probably since Bellatrix had told her about her plan to kidnap Potter and fake his death, discrediting Dumbledore in the eyes of the entire bloody world, and removing the greatest impediment to any such reforms.

He sighed. _This_ was the reason it was so difficult to do anything to truly oppose the girl — it was somehow always just _slightly _more appealing to cooperate with her, if only in the hope that she would move on more quickly if he did. And cooperation _did_ generally lead to opportunities which her allies were able to exploit to their own advantage. It hardly _mattered_ that she didn't create said opportunities _intentionally_.

"One can only hope," he said, in response to Madam Desmarais's news, before addressing her inquiry. "Miss Black would have had no need to cheat in order to produce such anomalous examination results. I have no doubt that, were it not for the fact that the guilds would flatly refuse to consider the application of an unqualified fourteen-year-old, she could take Masteries in Arithmancy, Applied Runic Magic, and possibly Magical Theory— Well, not _today_, but certainly by Lammastide. I expect it would take her some time to write up a suitable project for publication, you see. And _yes_, I _am_ saying that she would think it amusing, and entirely possible, to take three Masteries with a single project."

In fact, Severus suspected that the flexible, mobile Portal enchantment she had so casually allowed Zabini to use to check on Potter last week would qualify, because as far as he knew, that actually was impossible.

The corners of Madam Desmarais's mouth twitched into a rather doubtful smile, amused by his resigned, slightly resentful tone, but also not entirely believing him. "_Fourteen_?" she repeated. "No wonder they suspect her of cheating."

"Indeed. My understanding is that she was raised by a cursebreaker who specialised in runic magic. And she _clearly _takes after her...mother."

Desmarais raised a questioning eyebrow.

"Black, Rosier, and von Helmsthal, Nineteen Seventy-Seven; Black and de Mort, Nineteen Seventy-Five, Seventy-Two, and Seventy-One; and De Mort, Black, and von Helmsthal, Sixty-Nine." Those five articles, published in the _Arthrá_, were the foundation of stable modern time magic, loath though anyone outside the international Dark Arts community would be to believe it. "I believe she also used the name Ochiá before Nineteen Sixty-Seven, though those papers are mostly theoretical reflections on the nature of Shadowmagic and the cross-planar arithmantic implications derived from comparisons of the Dark Plane and Apparition Space—" Almost nobody had read those (despite their having been published legally as well as by Miskatonic), and Severus was fairly certain that most people who had hadn't understood them. Lily had said they were brilliant, but he couldn't get through more than the abstracts before becoming hopelessly lost. "—and Hela after Seventy-Six. That would be the Hela behind _Some Observations on the Werewolf Transformation and Potential Influences Thereupon_."

Desmarais's eyes had gone _very_ wide as she realised exactly who he was talking about, as he listed the time references. By the time he reached the end of his list, her mouth was gaping slightly, almost _certainly _because she'd actually _read_ Hela's essays. They were rather different than any of Bellatrix's other work — more anthropological than arithmantic — and probably the most popular in the potioneering community, given Belby's extensive referencing of them in his discussion of the development of the Wolfsbane potion in the years after the War.

"Are you telling me Hela is — was — Bellatrix Black?" There were vanishingly few individuals with both the ability and the inclination to spend any amount of time observing werewolves and the process of their transformation. Hela was widely believed to be a vampire. "No, no. Are you telling me your Dark Lady somehow produced a child in the midst of your little War?"

Severus ignored the characterisation of the War as _little_ — to a person who'd lived through Grindelwald's war, _and_ the muggles' simultaneous Second World War, it was. "Yes, and yes, that _is_ the prevailing theory regarding Lyra Black's origin. Surely you didn't think the Death Eaters spent _all _their time killing people. More to the point, I am also telling you that that child, though she almost certainly _could_ find a way to cheat on the Runes and Arithmancy OWLs, would even more certainly have no need to do so, which you may feel free to pass along to Madam Marchbanks. If she _still_ questions Miss Black's abilities, I'm sure the girl would be willing to sit _NEWT_ examinations in those subjects when she returns from her holiday."

Honestly, he rather hoped Marchbanks would take that suggestion, something to inconvenience the girl for the first few days of the school year, at the _very _least.

Before Desmarais could formulate a response — her English was _very _good, but it did take her a moment to work through her sentences before speaking — there was a knock on her open door, drawing his attention to a short, plump man whose neat black goatee did nothing to detract from the roundness of his face. Severus recognised his lapel pin as the symbol of the ICW's Department for International Cooperation (or whatever it was actually called in French, he could never keep these things straight), and he was wearing a rather miserable expression, though his occlumency prevented any hint of negativity from tainting the space around him.

He spoke rather quickly, but Severus was far better at interpreting French than he was at pronouncing it. "_Apologies, Madeleine, sir, for the interruption, I simply hoped to request a moment of your time, Maddie, whenever you may be free this afternoon._"

"_It is no trouble_," Severus said, before reverting back to English. "I was just leaving, assuming our business is completed, Madam Desmarais?"

"Of course. And once again, you have our office's gratitude for your efforts in designing the latest exam. If you change your mind about attending the recognition ceremony in Bern, you will let me know, yes?"

"I expect I will be fully occupied by my duties at Hogwarts," Severus said smoothly, though he was quite certain he could escape the school for a single evening. He simply had _no_ desire whatsoever to sit through a tedious political dinner, making small talk and wishing they'd use warming charms on the soup course. (They _never_ did, it was _déclassé_.)

"Oh!" the diplomat exclaimed, interrupting his attempt to esca– er, to offer a polite farewell. "You are from Hogwarts? But then of course you must stay!"

_Bugger_. Severus had found that he rarely enjoyed any conversation with anyone who wanted to talk to him _because he was a Hogwarts professor_. Granted, it was a slightly better reason to seek him out than his renown as a former Death Eater, but only _slightly_.

Madam Desmarais, who rather unreasonably appeared to have no other appointments on her books this afternoon, smiled broadly, introducing him before he could come up with an excuse to _leave_. _Other_ than simply not wanting to be there, of course. "_Maître_ Snape, this is _Monsieur_ Régis Delacour, one of the more...shall we say _notorious_ members of our diplomatic corp. Régis, Severus Snape, _Maître des Potions_."

"You must call me Régis," the man insisted, forcing Severus to offer a similar degree of informality.

"And I am Madeleine," Madam Desmarais added. "Now, we are all friends — what has you so very flustered, Régis?"

Delacour closed the door before answering. "I have only just come from speaking to the _Ministre_. I have been given a new assignment, and I simply have _no_ idea how to tell Apolline and the girls... The Office is sending me to Britain at _la Toussaint_, that—" The diplomat reverted to his own language to insult his boss before resuming in English. (Severus had no idea what _casse couille_ meant, but based on the tone, he was guessing something like _incomparable bastard_.) "—had the nerve to suggest that this would be _convenient_ for my family, to move at the holiday! As though I could possibly bring them with me! To _Britain_! I really may have to quit this time, Maddie."

It took Severus a moment to realise _why_ it would be so impossible for the diplomat to bring his family to Britain. Delacour wasn't a particularly _rare_ French surname, especially among muggleborns — he'd needed the clue of Britain being a _particularly_ poor place to bring them to recall that it was also used by one of the larger veela clans in Aquitania when they were dealing with humans. _Régis _must have married in.

"Now, Régis, there hasn't been a significant act of terrorism on British soil since Nineteen Eighty-One, the Supreme Mugwump insists that his home nation is safe enough to host the Quidditch World Cup this summer, and then—"

"—and then the Tri-Wizard Tournament, beginning in the final week of October, yes, I know, that's the excuse behind this– this _ridiculous_ excuse for an assignment! We — the Confederation — were invited to send a representative to participate in the judging of that farce of an attempt at international cooperation—" _Wait, _what_?_ "—shameless publicity stunt, more like — and Moreau has, in his infinite wisdom, decided that _I_ should be the one to go! To live alone, in _exile,_ for the better part of a _year_, or else pack up my family and bring them with me — let the girls study at Hogwarts for the year, broaden their horizons, ha!"

"I presume I've been asked to stay to provide an opinion on whether it is, in fact, feasible to bring your children to Hogwarts for the year?" Severus interjected.

"Is it?" There was a certain note of desperate hope in the man's voice. "You must know the sort of things which are said of your country, and I mean no offence, truly, but is it as bad as they say?"

"That depends on any number of factors," he began, only to be interrupted by Madeleine.

"Régis is concerned, Severus, because—"

"Because he married a veela. Obviously. And race-traitors tend not to be looked kindly upon by my countrymen. _Especially _among the humanocentric Light, whose ideals have shaped our public policy for the past twelve years. I _am _aware of the problematic situation the Nineteen Eighty-Three revision of our creature–being code has created for the few veela who, for whatever insane reason, wish to come to what I believe you all consider a cultural backwater — not that I disagree. Part of the negotiations for the Tournament included adopting the primacy of I.C.W. laws and regulations at Hogwarts for the duration of the Tournament, in deference to the fact that there will undoubtedly be several veela and lilin among the delegation from Beauxbatons." Presumably Régis had left his assignment briefing early, because Severus couldn't imagine his superiors would have neglected to inform him of that particular detail, given sufficient time. "I also believe Karkaroff refused to allow Durmstrang's participation if Dumbledore insisted on limiting the magics that might be used in the contest to those legally permitted in Britain. As long as your family remain within the boundaries of the Hogwarts wards, anyone who attempts to harm them would be prosecuted to the greatest extent of the Confederation's laws, but whether your children would be _safe_ is another question entirely.

"And before I answer it, I _must_ know, what the bloody _hell_ do you mean, you've been appointed as the I.C.W.'s judge?"

"What do you _mean_, what do I mean?" Régis asked, sounding rather taken aback.

"I _mean_, so far as I or Dumbledore or anyone who might have _told_ Dumbledore is aware, the judges for the Tournament are meant to be the Heads of the three schools, the Head of the British Department for International Magical Cooperation, and the Head of the British Department of Games and Sports."

Desmarais's eyes narrowed at that. "I was under the impression that the judges were meant to be _impartial_. With that panel, I can hardly believe the champion from Beauxbatons or Durmstrang stands a chance."

"In my opinion, Régis was on the mark when he characterised the impending farce as little more than a publicity stunt. However, you will note that nowhere on that list was a representative from the I.C.W., no matter _how_ much more impartial such an individual might make the judges' panel."

The diplomat shrugged. "My understanding is, a representative from the Wizengamot wrote extending an invitation sometime around Easter. My department has been been in communication with the Head of British International Cooperation to discuss the details. Apparently there has been a change of plans."

"A representative of the bloody _Wizengamot_? The Wizengamot has nothing to do with the Tournament!" It was, in fact, primarily a Ministry project, though Bagman from Games and Sports, a born con man with a serious gambling addiction, had convinced Dumbledore to support his mad plan early on, sold him the idea of bringing the thing back, bigger and better than ever before. Severus _thought _that winning the bid to host the World Cup this year had _entirely _gone to his head, but it wasn't entirely out of the question that he had some plan up his sleeve to finally hit it big and pay off his debts to the goblins — he was, according to Ministry gossip, leveraged up to his eyeballs and running out of time before he was handed over to Collections.

"That sounds like something you will have to take up with your Department of International Cooperation, or perhaps the Acting Head of House Black — I understand the initial invitation was sent in her name."

"The...Acting Head...of House _Black_." It was— Of _course_ it had been, Morrigan take that wretched girl. He could only _imagine_... "_Please_ tell me she mentioned who else she invited to her panel."

Another shrug. "I have not seen the invitation myself, but I was under the impression our representative was to join the _existing _judges, not to form a new panel entirely."

"Oh, she wouldn't have stopped at inviting the Confederation to send a representative. I wouldn't be surprised to see the latest Lord of Carthage and the bloody Green Lady show up expecting a seat at the table! Madeleine, I've changed my mind. Please tell Madam Marchbanks that Lyra Black almost _certainly _cheated on her OWLs. Tell her the girl has been exploiting stable time loops all year, it would have been simple enough for her to pass a copy of the questions to her past self, or that she is actually a centuries-old metamorph impersonating a fourteen-year-old. Hell, tell the W.E.A. that she convinced Bellatrix to de-age herself and take the tests for her, leaving a blood golem in the place of her supposedly comatose body. Anyone who has met her would believe it!"

Régis gave him a confused, nervous little chuckle. "I'm afraid I don't understand."

Desmarais fixed him with another peculiar, mostly-disbelieving half-smile. "Do you mean to say that the girl your Ministry suspects of cheating on her exams is this same...Acting Head, was it, who sent this invitation?"

"That is _precisely_ what I mean. The child is an unholy _terror_, you cannot possibly conceive—" Severus cut himself off, took half a second to center himself.

There was nothing to be gained from venting about Lyra Black being _impossibly_ infuriating, and a good deal to lose in terms of his reputation with the Confederation's examination authority by going on a rant about a teenage girl they'd never met and whose effect on every significant event around her they could hardly appreciate. He would simply have to deal with whatever chaos the girl had set in motion as best he could. And spending a few minutes detailing exactly _how_ maddening she was to foreign bureaucrats and diplomats wouldn't help in the least.

"I suppose what's done is done. I will investigate the matter further when I return to Britain. Forgive my digression — you, Régis wished to know whether your children would be safe at Hogwarts. I suppose it is too much to hope for that yours is one of the families who have been working with the bioalchemist Lise Delacour?"

The man looked rather startled by the abrupt change of subject, but he was hardly about to complain about having his question addressed. It _was_ rather important to him, after all. "Ah, yes, I'm afraid so. You mustn't misunderstand, I am my daughters' _father_, but they are fully veela."

"Yes, yes," Severus muttered, waving away the man's concern. He was well aware that there _were _biological incompatibilities between human and veela reproductive systems, though he couldn't say precisely _what _they were — the People were understandably leery of allowing a species so very prone to genocide access to information which could potentially be exploited to exterminate them.

The only humans who knew anything about it were those who had integrated into their culture so thoroughly they were hardly more likely to reveal anything than their veela and lilin partners. It was his understanding that Lise Delacour, like Régis, had married into the clan and had, _somehow_, managed to produce viable human-veela hybrids. That was literally all he, or anyone outside of the People, knew about her work. Well, that and that her children seemed to be human in almost every way, though their magic was more like that of the People. If Régis's children had been such hybrids, it was conceivable they could pass for human well enough that they would have no more problem at Hogwarts than the average muggleborn, perhaps.

Of course, if that had been the case, Régis would likely be _far_ less concerned about their acceptance in Britain. His wife could presumably take care of herself — most veela who had any interaction with humans at all (outside of those who had joined the People, of course) quickly became inured to a certain degree of xenophobia. The children, though... "How old are they? Your daughters."

"Fleur is seventeen. She has been considering travelling with the _Beauxbatonnais_ delegation, I am not so concerned about _her_. But my Gabrielle...she is only fourteen. A _precocious_ fourteen, she will be entering her fourth year at the Academy this year, but—"

"But she hasn't nearly the degree of control necessary to avoid any and all potential...incidents, shall we say."

The veela _allure_ was notoriously unstable in their early teens — much like most young mind mages, immature veela had a tendency to unintentionally affect the minds of those around them, often leading to a situation which Severus thought should more or less be considered sexual assault on all sides, unintentional though it was. Most humans who had any regular interaction with young veela were aware of this danger, and were able to take certain precautions against being affected — learning occlumency, for instance. But most British mages had never seen a veela in their life, let alone been close enough to one to feel their magic at work; Occlumency was hardly a widely-taught skill; and unwary humans who were able to fight off the allure (or in the wake of such an incident) often took it as some kind of threat or intentional attack, and retaliated. Violently.

And that wasn't even considering the fact that most British mages considered veela to be _creatures_. Severus was _well_ aware of the sort of things humans were like to allow themselves to do when they thought they could get away with them, if they considered their victims sufficiently _other_. Most of the Death Eaters, after all, had been sane, largely rational men. They had simply been given permission to treat muggles and muggleborns like animals, indoctrinated into a community where such attitudes were commonplace. And that was more or less the same attitude Britain at large held toward veela and other non-human beings today.

It took Severus a moment to think how to phrase the problem in a more politic way than _if you bring a teenage veela to Britain, she's likely going to be raped or lynched. Possibly both_.

"And while such incidents are understood, anticipated, and easily dealt with in Aquitania, the same cannot be said for Britain. Were she my daughter, I would not bring her to Hogwarts if it could possibly be avoided. Even with the legal situation temporarily altered... The law cannot prevent scared, stupid children—" (_or adults, really_) "—from acting on their fear and idiocy, and punishing them after the fact for their xenophobic actions, would, I imagine, be cold comfort."

Régis glared into the middle distance, presumably at his absent superiors. "I suspected as much. And they know I would not willingly endanger my girls, so this is nothing more or less than an attempt to exile me from both family and country for the duration of this bloody Tournament."

Desmarais sighed, her brow furrowing into a skeptical, slightly troubled frown. "Surely even Moreau would not—"

"Britain is a punishment detail, Maddie! I know it, everyone knows it! This is because of my speaking in defense of Emile and Solange Martin last month, I am _certain _of it." Severus snorted. "_You have something to say?_" Régis said sharply, more rebuke than invitation.

"Oh, no, only that your Department could not have played more neatly into Black's hands had they _tried_. Sending an open supporter of populist anti-stautarians like the _Martins _to _Britain_? To _Hogwarts_? Even if you are, by some minor _miracle_, the only extraneous judge Black invited, you must surely see how it will increase the tensions in what is certain to be an _incredibly _delicate diplomatic situation to force a Neo-Gemeenschoppist on _Albus_ _Dumbledore_, of all people. _Especially_ when, I assure you, no one has yet seen fit to inform _him_ of this little change of plans. And _doubly _so given the recent..._misunderstanding_, regarding Harry Potter. Which was _also_ organised by Black," he couldn't help but add.

Bellatrix would be _thrilled_. Both of them, probably. Severus, on the other hand, was _fucked_.

"Oh, it is far worse than that, my friend," Madeleine said, now starting to look seriously concerned. "Régis, now that Severus mentions more _recent_ political developments..."

"It _can't_ be about _her_, the Aquitanians wouldn't extradite her to Britain even if they had her in custody, and she's only been out of bed for two days, the only people who _know_ are those we trust not to spread rumors, and the People—"

Severus couldn't stop himself interrupting. "Are you _fucking_ kidding me?" Both of the others turned to stare at him, their attention drawn away from their frankly _awful_ attempt to avoid giving away the fact that there was only one notorious, female criminal who had recently escaped British custody. "Clan Delacour is harboring the Blackheart."

"_Harboring_ is such a..._fraught_ term. The People do not make a habit of turning away anyone who washes up on our beaches wounded and exhausted, in dire need of sanctuary. What could we do but take her in, allow her to recover? She has never committed any crimes against the People—"

"But she _has_ committed crimes against Britain, the I.C.W., and _humanity in general_. You cannot _possibly _believe it in any way safe to offer sanctuary to that madwoman. She tortures people for fun, you realise — your people can _hardly _consider it safe to allow her to stay in one of your compounds, _regardless _of the political difficulties her presence will inevitably cause."

Régis did _not_ seem sufficiently concerned to have _any_ idea the danger the danger his family was in at this _very _moment. "So far as I know, she has been...well, not _perfectly _well-behaved, she _was_ rather rude to Lise, but she certainly doesn't appear to be the savage your Light propaganda portrays her as."

Severus scowled at the implication that he could _possibly _have been mislead by the Light's portrayal of _his own leaders_ in the war. "I was on _her _side. Believe me when I tell you the propaganda doesn't do her justice."

Granted, he had seen more of Bellatrix's worst sides than most — she hadn't trusted him, and she'd seen breaking him as an entertaining challenge. She had certainly been more _brilliant _than the Light had portrayed her, a more complicated character, but they _had _also underestimated her sadism and savagery in their propaganda. Civilians, non-combattants, simply wouldn't have _believed_ the _truth_.

Delacour simply shrugged. "The worst thing she's done in the two days since she's left her bed is request to examine one of Lise's children — one of the half-lilin, I believe — which of course Lise did not allow."

"And when Bellatrix's demand was denied?"

"She...left Lise's office?"

"She just _left_," Severus repeated, entirely disbelieving.

"If I understand correctly, she teased Lise over her former ties to Britain for some time — Lise was rather annoyed that night — but aside from that... She has done nothing that would cause us to revoke her status as a political refugee."

"Political. Refugee."

"What else would you call someone imprisoned _with dementors_ for over a decade for the role she played in a politically motivated conflict, who has escaped and fled the country in fear for her life?"

"I _sincerely _doubt that she fears for her life," Severus grumbled. He also doubted that _all _of her actions in the war could be excused simply by virtue of having _been _at war. The ICW _did_ recognise certain tactics as war crimes, and he was almost positive she had committed enough to be sentenced to death a dozen times over. And it wasn't as though the dementors had particularly bothered her anyway.

"Nevertheless, do you imagine the People have any intention of extraditing her to Britain and their dementors, or Aquitania and lifetime imprisonment in Grindelwald's prison? Bearing in mind the veela attitude toward cages and confinement."

Severus scoffed. "No, I do not. And to return to the subject at hand, yes, I imagine that _would _be an even larger impediment to successful diplomatic relations with Britain than being branded a Neo-Grindelwaldian sympathiser."

"And an even more urgent reason to replace the envoy to _le syndicat_ with someone less sympathetic to them — someone considered more loyal to the Confederacy."

Wait — Régis was the envoy _to _the veela _from _the ICW? Or...possibly Aquitania? Severus wasn't entirely certain how the diplomatic situation worked here, but he would, in any case, have expected it to be the other way around, given that the diplomat had _married into a clan_. Honestly, Severus was slightly surprised he hadn't been replaced at the first indication that he was going native.

"They can _hardly _believe that the People will accept a replacement in my absence. Britain is a _temporary_ post, my _chargé _will of course hold the legation until I return."

"So you _are_ going to go, then?" Desmarais asked, her tone full of sympathy.

"What choice do I have? If I refuse the posting, I will in essence be resigning my post — Moreau would be only too pleased to strip me of any representative authority for any number of reasons, and there is, realistically, no one else who can play my role in maintaining the current stability between the Empire and Aquitania. Pelletier has the makings of a good envoy, but she's only been with us for two years. She _certainly _does not hold the same degree of trust with the People as I have. If I _leave_, or am forced out... _Le syndicat_ will _not_ be pleased. With me _or_ with the Confederacy. All I have worked for over the past decade may be shattered in a matter of months. I still have _no _idea how I will break the news to Apolline, or to Gabrielle."

Desmarais patted his shoulder consolingly. "I'm sure Apolline will understand, and Gabbie... She will miss her father, of course, but she would be at school for most of the time you are away, yes?"

"But not _all _of the time, and she is already so sad that Fleur might be travelling, you know how close they are..."

Severus scowled at him. "I would be willing to tell them, if you would agree to inform the Supreme Mugwump in my stead." Really, it wasn't as though he couldn't arrange to visit his family on the weekends, or even simply commute to Hogwarts to judge the tasks. His superiors would hardly need to _know_ that he wasn't staying at the school. In his opinion, Régis was entirely over-reacting. And even if he wasn't, breaking bad news to his wife and children was hardly the _worst_ job he could have been faced with.

Régis winced. "I will admit, you do seem to have drawn the worse lot. I do not envy you that task, my friend."

Severus snorted. No one in their right mind had _ever_ envied his lot in life. He was _quite_ certain no such person ever _would_. "Unfortunately, Régis, if announcing this change of plans is the worst problem I am tasked with resolving over the course of this bloody Tournament, I will count myself lucky, and be more pleased than you could _possibly _know."

(He was _never _that lucky.)

* * *

_Chronologically, this is very early in the summer, about a week after the end of AAtP, a day or two after Bella and Liz catching up. Yes, we're not posting these in order, we realise that's confusing. —Leigha_

_We are operating under the veela and lilin from my headcanon. Those who haven't read my shit, it's not super important, anything necessary will be explained in fic. Except the references to _le syndicat_ in this one anyway, that's just a word for the semi-official association of clans operating in western Europe, sort of act as a local government. It's complicated, and not that important to keep track of._

_Oh, and yes, Gabbie is aged up a few years from canon. For reasons. —Lysandra_


	3. Lies Told to Children

The soft summer breeze deposited her on the hilltop as gently as it was able, a few light skips bleeding off the rest of her momentum. She sang a quick thanks to the wind, marvelling in its beauty and its grace and its power — nature magic could be a fickle thing, after all, she wouldn't want it to decide they weren't friends anymore next time she needed to fly over a continent. Then, turning toward the familiar path, Castalia Lovegood started off for her brother's house.

She'd hardly gone three steps when she felt it. Magic, belonging to a person, bright and hot, yet feeling somehow distant, calm and smooth, inhumanly temperate. As peculiar and contradictory as it was, she'd been in contact with this particular soul more than enough to recognise it.

So she wasn't at all surprised, on reaching the path curving between the low hills of the Devon countryside, to find her niece sitting on the fence, idly kicking her feet, waiting. "Luna. Here I thought I'd actually catch you two out for once."

"Hello, Auntie." Luna didn't sound at all surprised to see her, appearing within a short walk of her home unannounced. (But then, Luna was hardly ever surprised by anything.) She hopped off her perch, her diaphanous white dress trailing a second behind her, started skipping along to Cassie's side. "I didn't tell Daddy you're coming. He'll be happy to see you. He's been very busy lately — we've been trying to confirm the rumors that Saoirse Ghaelach are going to replace the Man Behind the Curtain with Fionnabhair at the World Cup. Of course, they don't know that he's already _been _replaced by the Rotfang Conspiracy. Or possibly tempted into doing their bidding for gold. There's niffler blood in the House of Fudge, you know. Anyway, Daddy says it shouldn't make much difference, Saoirse will replace him either way, if he can confirm the rumors. So of course it's a great deal of pressure. A distraction will be good for him."

"Right." The girl's soft, absent voice was already putting her off, Cassie tried to suppress her discomfort, and probably didn't do very well. Certainly not well enough.

Despite her best efforts, she never had managed to come to like Luna — she did feel quite terrible about it, sometimes, but she just couldn't help it. She was an adorable little thing, the soft, light colours and rounded, dramatic features of Cassie's family paired with her mother's ethereal grace. But she'd also managed to inherit _both_ Lovegood legacies — she was _obviously_ an empath, and while Cassie had never gotten explicit confirmation she was a Seer too it wasn't much of a leap — while also being saddled with her mother's..._commitments_. Any one of those gifts in isolation would perhaps be a blessing, but _all three_...

Cassie couldn't imagine being an empathic Seer and a servant of Innocence at the same time was at all pleasant.

The point was, the girl was damn unnerving, always had been. Cassie _wanted_ to like her, she _did_, but...she just made it so bloody _difficult_. It wasn't Luna's fault, of course — she couldn't help what she was, not really. It wasn't even entirely about her, sometimes. Sometimes, she just reminded Cassie too much of her mother, and that...

Cassie would _never_ forgive Pandora for sacrificing her niece to Gelach. She understood why she'd done it, even respected it in a way, knew she hadn't truly had much of a choice. But feelings were often irrational like that.

The girl was giving her a wide, unblinking stare, somehow all too knowing — but then, she probably knew exactly what was going through Cassie's head at the moment, or at least the general feeling of it. So Cassie pushed her unease and old grudges aside as best she could, tried to smile. "So, I haven't been in Britain for a while. What have I missed?"

Cassie couldn't quite hold in a chuckle at the exasperated, almost harried look crossing Luna's face.

By the time they made it up to the Rookery, Luna had rambled on a good few minutes, mostly about what had been going on with her at Hogwarts. (Cassie _did_ keep up with the _Quibbler_ and the _Herald_, there was no need to fill her in on things that had made the papers.) Most of it was, of course, inconsequential — the lives of teenagers did tend to be, no matter how it might seem at the time — though a couple things did jump out at her. It was bloody _obvious_ that Luna was having serious troubles, especially surrounding her Patron, which was as interesting as it was concerning. She meant, it had taken a _literal war_ to get Pandora to drift from Innocence, that Luna was starting to so early, she _really_ must not be suited to Gelach. Not that Cassie hadn't already known that.

Also, Luna didn't go into very much detail, and likely didn't know enough to recognise it for what it was in any case, but that diary she described that had been possessing the little Weasley girl the year before sounded an _awful lot_ like a horcrux. Cassie had some experience with the vile things herself, and... Well, Dumbledore was bloody lucky no one had died, Ginevra was lucky to have gotten out the other side with her sanity..._mostly_ intact, anyway. And that wasn't even getting into the implications to Voldemort having made a horcrux such as that. She'd already known he was still around, of course — the last few years she'd caught wind of some very peculiar rumours — but the particulars of this case, this diary sounded oddly...expendable. Which suggested he'd made multiple of the things.

On the one hand, that was just absolutely insane, but on the other, this _was_ Voldemort they were talking about here. She couldn't say she was surprised.

And she was pretty sure Luna had implied at one point that the new Black heiress — the same one who'd invited her to participate in judging this bloody Tournament in the first place — was a black mage. It _was_ possible Cassie was reading too much into it but, well, that wouldn't be particularly surprising either, would it?

The Rookery was much as she remembered it in its structure, but the colouring and the decoration were rather different, especially on the inside. The kitchen had been entirely repainted, the cabinets and the walls and even the ceiling covered in the greens and browns of a forest, spotted with flowers yellow and blue — they were rendered with enough detail and depth it was a little disorienting, Cassie's hip hit the lip of a counter in passing, nearly tripped over one of the chairs. As they made for the stairs up, she spotted a pair of brightly-coloured birds alight on one of the branches, hop about for a moment, before flying off again, disappearing behind one of the windows. It was only then she noticed the entire thing was animated, the branches and leaves subtly swaying, the motion slight enough it hadn't been obvious at first glance.

Was that Luna's work? It didn't seem like the sort of thing Xeno would do — as eccentric as he could be at times, he had a rather ascetic bent when it came to such things, far too practical. (The consequences of an impoverished childhood, she assumed, despite her relative success she was much the same.) Just, it was _very_ well done, especially considering she hadn't even started her third year of schooling yet. Of course, she had already known the girl was talented, she was impressed all the same.

Years ago now, shortly after their parents had moved on and left the house to him, Xeno had knocked out a few walls and converted what had once been the living room and the dining room into what passed for the _Quibbler_'s satellite office and publishing house. (The old site in Charing was still used, of course, Xeno just preferred to work out of here.) Mother's enchanting was obviously still holding up — despite the walls being angled slightly inward, this level was larger than the ground floor — which meant Xeno must have done some work on the place himself, those walls would certainly have been integrated into the ward scheme. In fact, his workspace was larger than it'd been last time Cassie had been here: Xeno and Pandora had been using the bedroom, but it was gone now, the place it'd been taken up with shelves, stacks of references, a worn recliner.

She idly wondered where the hell Xeno _slept_. When they'd been children, they'd shared the little room on the top floor, but that was Luna's now last she'd checked. As strange as the two of them could be, she somehow doubted they were sharing it. Probably added another floor above or below, she guessed, that shouldn't be particularly difficult for him.

Xeno heard the two of them coming, started talking before they were even all the way up the stairs. "There you are, Moonbeam, I was just thinking of—" Sitting at his distressingly messy desk, he cut off the moment he looked up. "Cassie? What are you doing here?"

Jerking to a halt in the middle of the room, Cassie brought a hand over her heart, forcing out a breathy scoff. "Three years away, and that's what I get? And I thought you loved me, how _cruel_."

Sarcasm, obviously — he was up and across the room with his arms flung around her seconds later, light laughs ringing through her head. "I just didn't think you'd be in Britain!" He pulled back to arm's length, grinning at her. "Ah! We're getting _old_, but I'm still not used to you being all grown up." Before letting go, he ruffled her hair, the unbound ear-length strands tossed all over the place, over her eyes.

Cassie straightened it as much as she could without a mirror on hand, pouting up at him. Which only made him grin wider. "_Honestly_, Xeno, I'm not _that_ much younger than you."

"Still, you must allow me my moments, I'm afraid. What _are_ you doing in Britain, though? Didn't I read you were going to be in the open in Kolamba?"

"Yeah, I withdrew." Which a couple of her sponsors had been _less_ than happy about. Not that it really mattered — she'd pulled out early enough it wouldn't affect her rating, and their irritation with her was pointless, considering they weren't willing to actually drop her. Especially with what she was doing instead.

A rather odd, almost tense look crossed Xeno's habitually cheerful face. "Really?" Couldn't blame him for the surprise, Cassie broke her commitments _very_ rarely. "I wouldn't think there's anyone in Britain, at least none who need killing badly enough for you to break your word."

Luna, she noticed, looked _extremely_ uncomfortable at the reminder of Cassie's more...controversial hobby. But Xeno so off-handedly referring to her history of hunting down the worst criminal dark mages the world over just made Cassie laugh, her voice sounding light and delighted to her own ears. "You might be surprised. But, no, that's not why I'm here. I was invited to be one of the judges for the revival of the Triwizard coming up."

"So you'll be in the country all year, then?"

"Looks like it. You wouldn't happen to have a sofa or something for me to crash on?"

Xeno chuckled, taking her up in another tight hug instead of answering.

Within a few minutes, Xeno, happily chattering on about current events in Britain and how exactly he'd been twisting it all into satirical code fit to print, was leading her back down into the kitchen — he had been thinking about getting lunch already, apparently. (Which was sort of odd, given it _was_ nearly three in the afternoon, but Xeno had been forgetting to properly manage himself for longer than Cassie could remember.) He'd had tea going for a little bit — not _tea_ tea, one of those odd, flowery tisanes Dad had introduced them too, she honestly didn't even know what was in it — pasties on a warming plate just starting to steam, when he moved way from the political and back into the personal. "By the way, have you dropped in on Mother yet?"

Cassie scowled at Xeno's back; tending to the tea, he didn't see it. Luna definitely did though, gazing steadily at her, absent yet somehow disapproving. "No, and I wasn't planning on it."

"She has been asking after you, you know."

"I'm sure she has, and yet I fail to care."

"Cassie, I really think you should—"

"And I think _you_ should really shut up right now."

"Honestly, I don't see why the both of you have to be so stubborn about this. It's been, what, fifteen years now? Can't we just—"

Cassie was rescued from having to suffer this conversation once again by the door outside slamming open, hard enough it struck the opposite wall, rattling for a moment. "I'm sorry, Xeno, you mind if I stay—" Their guest — a girl about Luna's age, though rather taller and fitter, with a freckled face and bright red-orange hair — cut off the instant she spotted Cassie. "Oh, er... If this is a bad time, I can..."

"Nonsense!" The note of exasperated disappointment had vanished from Xeno's voice, and he turned a brilliant grin on the girl. "The more the merrier, I always say. Luna darling, put another pie on for Ginny."

"Oh, no, I er..." But her half-hearted protest was too late, Luna had already gotten out another pasty, a warming charm speeding it along. The girl huffed, rolling her eyes. "You do know it's the middle of the afternoon, right? I have already eaten. Like, two hours ago."

"Is it?" Xeno glanced around the room, as though looking for a clock on the walls — there wasn't, of course, why would there be? With a shrug, he dismissed the subject, turned back to the tea.

Luna was now staring at Ginny, somehow seeming more focused than normal, an almost uncharacteristic sharpness to her eyes. She glanced back at Cassie quick, then back, her head tilting slightly. "This isn't a bad time, Ginevra. My aunt Cassie just dropped by, is all." There was a forced casual tone to her voice — a patently false one, Luna was perhaps the worst actor Cassie had ever met. (Gelach's influence, she assumed, Innocence wasn't given toward deception as a rule.)

The girl jumped, turned to stare at Cassie, eyes almost comically wide. "You... You're Castalia Lovegood."

"Yup." Cassie wiggled her fingers, smirking. "Nice to finally meet you, I've heard nice things, _et cetera_ and so forth."

Ginny just kept staring, face blank with...shock? wonder? Couldn't tell for sure, not that the distinction particularly mattered — the girl clearly didn't know what to do with this in either case. Not that Cassie was _entirely_ sure what to do with Ginny either. As soon as she stepped further into the kitchen, enticed toward the table with smiles and biscuits, it became all the more clear there was something..._weird_, about her magic. It was dark, but..._not_, not really. Both dark and light, but not inherently, like Lily's had been toward the end of their schooling, but... Like a dark shadow thrown over a light core, pulling and dragging at it, but unsuccessfully, the light fighting back, sharp and hot and furious. It'd clearly been at it for a while, the shadow losing but not yet obliterated completely, still a frozen weight upon her soul.

It took a long moment, picking at the edges of her mind (lightly enough most occlumens shouldn't even notice), for Cassie to come up with a guess. An _insane_ guess. Luna had said the horcrux had been possessing Ginny...but if it'd been possessing her _when it was destroyed_...

That might be a new one on Cassie. She wasn't certain she'd ever heard of someone _subsuming a horcrux_ before. Well, _someone else's_ horcrux. Instinctively, of course, she doubted Ginny had actually studied Subsumation, but still. She had _no idea_ what that might do to a person. Theoretically, it wasn't impossible the horcrux could have taken Ginny over completely, but it was clear that wasn't happening, Ginny's stubborn assertion of her own identity powerful enough to overwhelm the vile thing. But she would _certainly_ be changed by the process, making her harder, sharper.

Making her burn all the brighter.

Drawing a fair bit of power, but not forming it into any particular spell, she let it just float out into the air around her, slowly filling the room with light magic, thick and warm and soft. The girl immediately reacted, some of the stiffness going out of her shoulders, her own magic rising to meet that on the air, like seeking like, but with a hint of...not desperation, exactly, but a furious drive all the same, unrelenting.

Cassie smiled. She couldn't help it — it wasn't every day she got to meet a future warrior for the Light.

* * *

"You know, I always did like it out here."

It took some effort for Cassie to force her eyes open, made all too comfortable by softening and warming charms, fading afterglow pulling her into sleep. "Hmm?"

"There aren't many places like this in the muggle world anymore, you know. There are a few old growth forests here and there, but the one I've been to in Britain felt..." Lily had sat up, gazing out into the woods around them, a soft smile on her face. "They're managed, you know, they're not let to grow naturally anymore. This just feels...different."

Wilder, she meant. Cassie wasn't surprised it would pull at Lily like this — Artemis did like her too, after all. "Yeah. I do like it out here. Sometimes, I just have to..."

Lily smiled. "Get away?" From civilization, she meant, from the person she had to be back at Hogwarts.

There wasn't really anything to say to that, so Cassie just hummed in agreement. She looked up, searching out the sky between the cover of greens and browns — it was changing colour already, starting to tinge yellow and orange with approaching sunset. Maybe it was better Lily had kept her from drifting off. Cassie had brought her out here to introduce her to the wilderfolk, but her usual friends hadn't shown up at their meeting spot. Too wary with a stranger about, she assumed, she should have warned them ahead of time. While waiting, they'd gotten into a meandering discussion about high magic, as often happened when they had nothing better to do. Which had eventually progressed into snogging, and then shagging, as usually happened when they had nothing better to do.

The point was, Cassie had lost track of time. "We should think about getting back up to the castle." Not that the forest at night would be dangerous for them, they could take care of themselves, but they would _certainly_ be missed. Lectures and detentions were so tedious.

"That's not really what you want." Lily turned, moving to straddle Cassie's hips, leaning over her, until deep red hair cut off the forest around them, all Cassie could see the brilliant smirk on her lips, the eager light in her eyes. "We could stay here, you know. Leave everything behind, and just stay, just the forest and Magic and the two of us. Forever."

Cassie smiled, and— She stopped. "I'm dreaming." She might have gone on for a while without noticing, but she remembered, this wasn't what had happened that night. (Lily had sighed and agreed, they'd spent the next few minutes trying to track down their clothes — she was pretty sure they never had found Lily's knickers, she'd been a bit annoyed about that.) But, despite the fact that she somehow hadn't remembered until just now that Lily had been dead for nearly thirteen years, she felt all too..._awake_ for this to be a normal dream.

Oh, she knew what was happening. She smirked. "We must stop meeting like this, Artemis."

Not-Lily's face scrunched into an all-too-adorable pout. "Oh, poo." She sat back again, her arms crossing over her chest. "How do you always figure it out so quickly?"

"The escape-your-responsibilities-into-the-wilds thing is sort of a dead giveaway." Cassie propped herself up on her elbows, careful to not jostle her too much. With a conscious effort to ignore the sight of a very naked teenage Lily sitting on her, Cassie ticked up an eyebrow. "If you're _trying_ to fool me, maybe don't pick someone who's been dead for over a decade."

Artemis pouted again.

"Though, I'm still not sure what the point would be. Are you _trying_ to get in my pants?" Artemis did pop into her dreams on occasion, more often than not as one former lover or another, which was just sort of...weird. In fact, Cassie was pretty sure she _had_ shagged the goddess at some point, she didn't always remember her Artemis dreams very well.

With a coy sort of smile, Artemis purred, "What, don't you like me?"

Cassie had to laugh at that — Artemis had been her first friend, she'd been around longer than Cassie could remember. (She distinctly recalled that her mother had thought Artemis was just an imaginary friend she'd made up, she couldn't have been older than five or so for that conversation.) She didn't know why she'd attracted Artemis's attention so early, nor did she really care. It was just part of who she was, as far as she concerned, there really wasn't much point in thinking about it too much.

Actually, Cassie had nearly dedicated herself to Artemis, a long time ago. She'd considered it very seriously for a time, from the ages of nine to twelve or so, and the idle thought still cropped up time to time even now. She didn't think she ever would, if only because, honestly, formally committing herself would change very, very little. She couldn't imagine how she could live a more...Artemis-ish life than she did already, so it hardly mattered.

"Mm." Not-Lily smiled at her for a moment, the expression warm and tolerant. "But no, Lily's just been on my mind lately. I did like her, you know."

She did. She'd introduced them, in fact, the Imbolc of her third year at school — Cassie had played a large part in sparking Lily's interest in high magic in the first place. She was never certain whether she should feel guilty for that or not. Lily _had_ mostly targeted people who deserved it, but she'd been growing increasingly...problematic, toward the end. (Artemis hadn't _stopped_ liking her, so Cassie was probably just thinking about it too hard.) "Why? She's been dead for ages now."

"In your world, maybe — there are more than a few where she's still around. But even here..." Artemis smiled. "...people aren't always as far away as they might seem."

Did... Did Artemis mean that metaphorically, or...? She meant, Cassie was _pretty sure_ that if Lily had insured herself against death somehow she would have heard of it by now. Lily was certainly _capable_ of doing something like that, but... "What is _that_ supposed to mean?"

"Now now, love, you know better than that — that would be telling." The teasing smirk faded away after a moment, replaced with something more solemn. "But I did actually have a reason for coming to you tonight."

That's funny, so far as she could tell Artemis never had a reason for dropping by. Unless there was a particularly awful person she wanted her to assassinate, anyway. "Oh? Who am I killing this time?"

"Oh, no one. It's about your sweet little niece."

Cassie couldn't quite keep in a scowl. As wildly different as they might seem, Artemis and Gelach were technically Aspects of the same Power — Youth, Innocence, Truth, whatever, theirs was particularly hard to define. There was no way Artemis wanting to speak to her about Luna could end well.

Not that she was concerned Artemis would want her to, she didn't know, do anything _bad_ to Luna. Artemis was one of the more violent of her kind among the Light, but it was violence with a very particular purpose. She was an odd, contradictory goddess in some ways, many people she'd spoken to had difficulty wrapping their head around it all. She was Innocence, but not the gentle, wholesome sort of Innocence people usually thought of — hers was wild and unrestrained, primal, the "innocence" of untouched wilderness, the "innocence" of humanity uncorrupted by social conditioning and expectations. (She also had a soft spot for children more generally, but that was harder to fit into the narrative.) Unlike many other Aspects, who demanded their dedicants exemplify the shade of the human experience they represented, Artemis instead called her servants to preserve it. To defend it against those who threatened it, by means of violence if necessary.

Artemis was peculiar among the other Aspects of Innocence in that her dedicants, more often than not, were motivated into her service due to a _loss_ of innocence. To a degree, anyway — Cassie had no doubt that, had she submitted to the commitments and routines of ordinary society, Artemis would have lost much of her interest in her.

She'd approved of Cassie's ardent refusal to bow to her mother's expectations for her, her refusal to marry, no matter the conflict it'd caused within her own family. She approved of her nomadic life, flitting from one city to another, one country to another, her only commitment to make enough appearances at dueling tournaments and the like to keep her sponsors happy, so she could support herself, despite the worldliness, the disillusionment it'd left her with. She approved of the personal relationships she had kept, intense and wild but fleeting, fluttering in and out of their lives like a bird uncaged, despite, you know, all the sex. She approved of her hobby, no matter how thoroughly she'd washed her hands in blood.

Cassie might seek out conflict, might murder on the regular, but so long as doing so shielded others from the horrors of the world Artemis would always approve.

No, she didn't fear Artemis would want her to harm Luna, she'd never ask Cassie to harm a child. But she didn't doubt for a second that Artemis would ask Cassie to kill for her, if she thought it necessary. And Cassie didn't doubt for a second she would do it, if she thought it necessary, she wouldn't even hesitate — no matter how much her brother and Luna would both fear and despise her for it.

"What about Luna?"

"You don't need to look quite so anxious, love. It's nothing bad. Our little Moonchild is going to come wake you up in a moment here. She needs your advice, you see, desperately. And you're going to give it to her, as best and honestly you can." Artemis said it casually enough, but Cassie recognised the subtle tone of command on her voice.

A completely unnecessary command — when had she ever refused to do whatever Artemis asked her to? — but all right then. "Okay, but, why are you bothering to tell me this? Just doesn't seem like your business, is all..." Not to mention Cassie wasn't exactly likely to turn Luna away...

With a smile touched by a hint of sadness, Artemis said, "You'll see. Here she comes now. Good luck, Cassie." She leaned forward, leaving a light, quick kiss on her lips.

Before Cassie could decide how the fuck she was supposed to respond to a bloody goddess borrowing the form of an old lover randomly kissing her, something crossed the edge of her palings, adrenaline shocking her into wakefulness. In a blink she was sitting up in a shadowy room, after a few seconds recognising it as the new bedroom Xeno had made for himself in the basement. She'd protested, but he'd insisted she take his bed, relegating him to that recliner in his office. (She would have been fine with sharing, but her palings gave him a headache, and she simply couldn't sleep without them anymore, force of habit.)

Luna stood in the doorway, her nightgown almost glowing in the darkness, frozen some steps away, stiff and startled. Staring back at her, eyes wide, almost looking afraid.

Which..._might_ have something to do with how Cassie's wand had sprung into her hand, turned to level on the intruder before she'd even fully woken up. (Force of habit.) "Oh, Luna," she said, dropping her hand back to the bed. "Sorry about that, I'm just a bit jumpy, I guess." She had good reason to be, she couldn't count how many times someone had tried to kill her in her sleep. "Did you need something?"

"Yes." Wavering for a moment, Luna finally stepped further into the room, drifting with that floating gait of hers over to sit on the edge of the bed. "I can't talk to Daddy about this sort of thing. He doesn't understand high magic the way we do."

Oh. Well, that was true — Xeno was _far_ more open to the true nature of Magic than most of the Light in Britain, but it wasn't a particular area of interest of his, and he hadn't much personal experience in it. Just vicariously through Cassie and Pandora, really. "I'm not _actually_ a white mage, you know—" At least, she didn't think she was? Artemis wasn't one for formality, she couldn't be certain. "—but I'll help however I can. Is this about your Patron?"

Honestly, Cassie couldn't decide if that would be a good thing or not. Luna would _certainly_ be happier out from under Gelach, but the only way to do that without causing serious problems would be to transfer Luna to another Aspect of the Light, which would be...complicated. That would require a true ritualist. Cassie had _some_ experience with ritual, of course, but it wasn't her speciality. And she couldn't think of one she knew who might be talented enough to pull it off that she actually trusted with her niece.

"Mm, not directly. There's this boy at school."

..._What?_

"Can someone be Dark and a good person at the same time?"

"Er..." It took a moment for Cassie to suppress her surprise and confusion — a dedicant of Gelach was pretty much the _last_ person she'd expect to have _boy troubles_ — before she could actually manage a response. "I suppose that depends. In general, though, yes. When it comes down to it, most people aligned with the Dark aren't _that_ different than those with the Light. Our attachments to Magic do influence our personalities to a degree, in different ways, but people are still people. All groups have all sorts.

"Those with the Dark might be more inclined toward selfish or destructive impulses, but exactly what that looks like varies quite a lot. They can still be good people. In fact, some of my best friends have been declared for the Dark." Feeling a suspicious frown on her own face, Cassie said, "Why do you ask?"

"What if they're more than just Dark?" There was an odd tension about Luna, an intensity, making her seem almost fragile, sitting there on the edge of the bed, so young and so vulnerable. It almost hurt to look at her. (Cassie had _far_ too much empathy for suffering children, she entirely blamed Artemis.) "Can you ever trust a black mage?"

"Ah... Well, that depends, doesn't it? Not all black mages are the same, there's plenty of variety there."

"But they're the _enemy_."

Cassie tried to hold in a sigh, and completely failed — dammit, Pandora, what had she been telling this kid? "No, Luna, they aren't. Portraying all the Dark as fundamentally opposed to all the Light is a massive oversimplification, and a needlessly aggressive one at that."

An unfairly adorable pouty frown twisting her lips, Luna said, "What's aggressive about it?"

"Are you telling me you can't see the inherent violence in a group saying their members are inherently good, and all outsiders are inherently evil? Seems obvious to me." If nothing else, the Twentieth Century had proved an extended lesson in the problems with that sort of thinking. "This Turkish ritualist I know, she says people tend to think of the Light and the Dark as distinct forces in opposition or, somewhat more neutrally, as two sides of a coin. But, she says, the true nature of Magic is more like a rainbow, a spectrum of experience with innumerable shades of expression. The tendency to split it up into pieces is a consequence of the human drive to define and categorise things, not a reflection of reality. Exactly what the Light and the Dark even are can't be unambiguously defined, so, making broad, universal statements of the people aligned with each is...well, impossible. The world simply doesn't work like that."

That pout was only getting stronger. "But, you're an acolyte of _Innocence_."

Cassie smiled. "I like to think that, without the corruptive influence of certain irredeemable individuals, we can all learn to coexist. When you think about it, that is sort of naïve too, don't you think? I just come at it from a different angle than Pandora. She saw conflict as an inevitable consequence of the fundamental structure of reality — black and white, simple. I see it as the result of individual choice and circumstance — shades of grey, but more optimistic, I would argue. We can never be rid of the Dark, and we shouldn't want to, but we can learn to get along, I think."

"What if they say they're trying to help you?" Luna had blurted it out, seemingly without thinking, cringing a little the next instant, looking away and shrinking in on herself a bit. "If they say they can..."

"Luna, what the hell is going on?"

The girl glanced at her quick, a twinkle of tears flickering in the darkness, before turning away again. "I don't... There's this boy at school, he... He said he can help me. Get away from Gelach." She sounded like a frightened child saying it, whispering something forbidden.

So, this _was_ about rededicating herself, then. Roundabout way to get there, but okay. "You asked about black mages because he is one, then."

"Not yet. He said he's drawn to Mystery, but he hasn't committed himself yet."

"Oh, _Mystery?_ Mystery is fine."

Luna started, turning a wide-eyed, surprised stare on her. "What?"

"Mystery is fine," Cassie repeated, shrugging. "Servants of Mystery are generally unconcerned with earthly matters — it's very likely that, if he's offering to help you with a rededication, the only thing he wants out of it is the experience of the magic itself. I wouldn't be surprised if some Aspect of Chaos put him up to it, Mystery's people often deal with other Powers on the regular, but that needn't be nefarious either. Chaos tends not to approve of the way some Aspects, like Gelach, just _take_ dedicants—" Luna flinched. "—so the only interest Chaos would have would be in giving you a choice in the matter. Righting a wrong, as they see it. Well, certain Aspects might get a kick out of starting a feud between the gods, but they're generally wise enough to not actually do it, and targeting so...passive a goddess as Gelach wouldn't do much to that end anyway.

"So, I guess what I'm saying is, if this Mystery boy is offering to help you, it's _very_ possible the offer is genuine. And he might even have the knowledge and skill to pull it off. Again, people are people — if you think you can trust him personally, you should do it."

All through her little speech, Luna had been watching her, a frown slowly growing as she went. "You sound like...you _like_ Mystery and Chaos."

Cassie almost laughed. "Luna, sweetie, you just said I'm an acolyte of Artemis. Artemis is one of the three faces of Hecate. Youth, Wisdom, Mystery, and Death are more closely linked than you might think."

Her face twisting with a remarkably unpleasant scowl, given that this _was_ Luna, she muttered, "You and Lyra Bellatrix say the same thing. It's...lies told to children." Cassie wasn't entirely sure what she meant by that, but it probably didn't matter so much, given she changed the subject immediately.

The next couple minutes were much lighter, just a little bit more about how the Light–Dark divide wasn't nearly as much of a rift as it's usually depicted. More from a theory angle than a personal one, less immediate. Finally, with an airy thanks and an apology for bothering her, Luna stood up again, drifted her way out of the room, disappearing into the night.

Cassie flopped onto her back, letting out a long sigh. That had been... It _could_ have gone worse, _much_ worse, but she still...

Just, she needed somewhere else to stay. Less than twenty-four hours at her brother's house, and she was already so bloody tired.

* * *

_Saoirse Ghaelach — The Gaelic (Irish/Scottish) nationalist movement in magical Britain. The name is a reference to the real-life (but defunct) far-left Irish Republican group Saor Éire. The comparison isn't meaningful, just needed a name._

_Fionnabhair — Quibbler codename for Síomha Ní Ailbhe, one of the younger members of the leadership of Saoirse Ghaelach, and a recurring OC of mine. —Lysandra_

_(You would not believe how much time we spend trying to come up with Quibbler Names. And Quibbler BS in general. It's kind of ridiculous. —Leigha)_

_Kolamba — Colomba, the city in Sri Lanka_

_So, yeah, that random manic episode over Easter is actually gonna have long-term consequences. Who knew? Exactly what happened will be explained more in a later scene, but it's not super important at the moment._

_What is important is how awesome Cassie Lovegood is, I mean come on. —Lysandra_


	4. She's not a vampire

"So," Bellatrix said, plopping onto the sofa beside Sirius, apparently out of nowhere. "Have you given any thought to a marriage alliance?"

Before Sirius could formulate a response that wasn't just _Fuck you, Bellatrix_, Mira called for her from somewhere toward the front of the flat. Thank God. He'd been avoiding this for _weeks_ — it was one of the last few things on her list of House Black Issues that Must Be Addressed (And Can Be Addressed Before the Trial Concludes).

But, well...there were few things Sirius wanted to do less than discuss marriage alliances. He hadn't wanted to discuss them with Arcturus when he was Little Bella's age, and he certainly didn't want to discuss them now. _Especially _since she seemed to think _his _marriage should be the focus of such a conversation. If they were really going to do this whole Noble and Most Ancient House of Black _thing_, it would be _far _more reasonable, given their relative ages, to be discussing _her_ marriage prospects.

He'd thought he'd had her there, that she would defer the conversation rather than become the subject of it, but that had lasted all of two bloody seconds. _Oh, I won't be getting married. Actually, wait, no, maybe Theo Nott. I'll ask around, see if he's spoken for yet. Your turn._

(He'd fled.)

"Just a minute, Zee, we're in the middle of something!"

"No, Lyra, right now!" Sirius had known Mirabella Zabini pretty much as long as he could remember. He didn't think he'd ever heard her sound stressed before, but she definitely sounded a bit tense, there.

Bellatrix obviously heard it too. She looked to the door, apparently startled. "This conversation is not over," she informed him before stalking away.

He followed, of course. He wanted to know what was going on, especially if it was important enough to make _Mira _worry.

"What is it, Zee?" Bella asked, then stopped in the doorway so suddenly he nearly ran into her. "Er, hi?"

That might be the least articulate thing he'd ever heard her say, though as she regained her senses enough to get out of the way, he immediately understood why. There was a...he didn't even know what, something that _looked _like a witch — a waifish, dark-haired, light-eyed woman who appeared to be about twenty years old — but had a darker aura around her than any human he'd ever met, _including _Bellatrix _and _fucking de Mort. A vampire? Some kind of demon? No, demons weren't known for their skill at blending in, and she looked like she could be a muggle who'd just stepped in off the street — probably a vampire.

Though he'd never seen a vampire with freckles before.

"The Acting Head of House Black, I presume," she said, sounding faintly amused.

Bella bowed. Actually, _properly_ bowed, according the stranger a status on par with a foreign dignitary. Did she actually know who — or _what_ — she was? "Lyra Black, at your service. This is Sirius Orion." She gestured at him. "He's the _actual _Head of the House, he's just currently a fugitive. If I might enquire...?"

"Oh, Envoy will do, I think, for the moment. Lord Black," she added, catching his eye and giving him a nod. _God _that was weird.

He nodded back, warily. "Envoy. Ah...Envoy of what? Or whom, I guess?"

"The Miskatonic Valley Magical Collective."

Oh. Oh _fuck_. The urge to pop into Padfoot's form and hide under a desk somewhere had already been there, at the back of his mind — standing even this close to the envoy was reminding him of the bloody dementors, that creature-dark aura making his skin crawl — but _that_ little phrase made the urge nigh unbearable. Miskatonites were fucking _scary_. Literally all of them. Completely amoral madmen obsessed with studying the darkest, most terrifying magics, every one, and they tended to kill each other off often enough that only the most dangerous survived to continue their evil experiments. No wonder Mira had sounded _off_.

"Lyra, would you happen to know why Miskatonic is sending envoys to my doorstep?" she asked, her voice still tight, not quite hiding her disapproval and fear.

Bella, of course, was unphased. Likely because she'd fit right in at Miskatonic. "Uh...no?" she said, dropping onto a sofa, her brief flirtation with propriety apparently over. "I haven't done anything to annoy the Dean...I don't think?"

"No, Leslie found your letter most amusing, in fact."

"Letter?" she repeated.

Mirabella waved a bit of parchment at her before reading off, "_I am pleased to therefore extend an invitation to the University to choose a representative to serve as an impartial judge, in the name of global international cooperation._ Is this ringing any bells?"

Bellatrix sniggered. "Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. Does this mean you're sending someone?"

"What the— The Triwizard judges were determined _over a year ago_! The Heads of the three schools, Crouch from International Cooperation, and someone from Games and Sports!"

"Yeah, whoever decided that needs to reconsider their definition of the word _impartial_."

Wait, she'd just...changed the judges for the bloody Triwizard Tournament?

"When— How— _Why_...?"

_Yes, that!_

"Remember when I was a bit mad over Easter and you told me I could come up with new wards for you and came here so you didn't have to deal with me? Well, I happened to come across a certain file while I was measuring your study. And, um...it seemed like a good idea at the time? I mean, it must have, or I wouldn't have done it. So, is the University going to send someone?" she repeated, grinning brightly at the vampire.

"The matter was put to a committee. It was determined that we could hardly deny such an opportunity to further international cooperation. Assuming the invitation is legitimate."

"Which you are here to determine," Bella guessed. The envoy nodded.

"Exactly how offended would the University be if it _wasn't_?" Mirabella asked, her voice impressively even. Sirius was still fighting the urge to flee.

"That depends entirely upon who else has been invited to judge, and whether they accept."

"_Lyra_?"

"The three Heads, that's Dumbledore, Karkaroff, and Maxime; Cassie Lovegood; Perenelle Flamel; and a representative from the ICW. Two light, three moderates, two dark, assuming the University sends someone. One from each school, one British expatriate, not sure where the ICW judge will be from — not any of the schools' catchment areas, if they're being political about it — Flamel's so old I doubt she has any patriotic incentive to support France _or _Britain, and obviously the University representative would be an outsider as well. And there's a pretty broad range of expertise. You've got Dumbledore for transfiguration, alchemy, and arithmancy; Karkaroff for healing, potions, offensive and defensive magic; Maxime's an enchantress, so charms, transfiguration, arithmancy, runes; Lovegood obviously knows her offensive magic and dueling, specifically focused on light charms and elementalism, though I'd be shocked if she hasn't fought enough dark wizards to judge offensive and defensive magic in general. And Flamel...honestly, six and a half centuries is a long time. I think the only thing she _doesn't _do much of is offensive magic."

Mirabella, on the other side of the room, was looking rather pale. Sirius could sympathise. Those weren't exactly the sort of people one said _no_ to, if they chose to involve themselves in whatever you were doing. The _least _impressive among them was Cassie Lovegood, and she was a top-ranked international duelist when she wasn't battling would-be Dark Lords all over the bloody world.

"I asked them all to get back to you in time to choose alternates, if they were declining to participate, so I'd guess they're going to be there if you haven't heard anything yet. Or maybe they wrote directly to Crouch — I did say that further communications would be through his department, didn't I?"

"Oh, we would certainly be offended if the ICW were allowed a representative, and the University's invitation revoked," the vampire said, smirking _very _slightly.

Mira glared at Little Bella before turning back to the envoy "Of course the University's invitation hasn't been revoked. Though I will have to refer you to the Department of International Cooperation regarding the details of visas and diplomatic amnesty. I suppose it's too much to hope that you'll send someone who's _not _wanted by the ICW for crimes against humanity?"

"Oh, yes. We could hardly send a student to handle such a delicate diplomatic situation as this. But I believe your Lady Cromwell burnt the outstanding warrant for my arrest in Britain, so it should be a _relatively _simple matter."

Mirabella's eyes widened slightly. "_You_ are the judge they've chosen to represent them?"

The envoy nodded, just once, still smirking. "I understand the local regulations regarding dark magic will be relaxed for the duration of the Tournament?"

"Ah..._yes_, but..._probably _not enough to condone feeding on humans. Even if you _do_ leave them alive."

The vampire's smirk broadened. Had Miskatonic deliberately chosen a judge they knew would be refused, just as an excuse to cause trouble with the ICW?

"She's not a vampire, Zee."

Mirabella looked almost as surprised to hear that as Sirius was. "What is she, then?" he hissed, leaning over the sofa to get nearer to her ear.

Not close enough that the envoy didn't overhear, though. Her laughter was far too light and tinkling to match her aura. "I'm surprised you don't recognize me, Sirius Orion. We've spoken before, if you recall."

"I'm quite certain I _would_, if we had."

"I suppose you could think of me as the _yes_ part of 'yes and no.'" _What? _She sighed. "And we were so very close to overwhelming the Evans girl, too."

Sirius felt his eyes go wide as he scrambled as far from the entity in the chair as he could, only stopping when his back hit the wall — it wasn't a conscious decision— "Y-You're _the Dark_? But— _How_?"

She laughed again. _Giggled_. "Ask her," she said, nodding at Bellatrix.

"I have no idea," Bella said, preemptively. Still stupidly calm, as though the Darkness Itself standing in their parlor was hardly cause for alarm.

The bloody _Dark _paused for a moment, blinking at her in confusion. Then its expression cleared. "Oh, right — it's still Ninety-Four. Well, give it a couple of years. Now, I really must be off, I expect I'll see you all in Britain."

"Of course," Bella said, rising to bow again. "Envoy."

_The bloody Dark_ nodded. "That reminds me, you may be informal with me, little sister, but if I'm coming back to Britain, I _will_ need you to stop using my name. It's causing all manner of confusion in certain circles, you know."

_Little sister?!_ What the fuck was _that _supposed to mean?! (The Dark Itself did _not_ just confirm that Little Bella was a black mage...did it? Because he...kind of thought it had, which just..._fuck_!)

She vanished before Bellatrix could come up with a response, which was probably just as well, because as soon as the oppressing darkness left the room, she jumped on the sofa, kneeling to face him over its back, grinning like a lunatic. "Siri, Siri — do you know who that was? Do you have _any _idea?"

"Uh...the Dark?"

"Well, _yes_, but the _person_." Before he could think of a response she ran out of patience. "Angélos Black — that was _Angel fucking Black_." Angélos Black as in, the one who'd gone on a teenage murder spree and vanished without a trace in _1502_?! "I didn't even know she was still _alive_. And she's going to be at Hogwarts next year! This is _so _much better than I expected, sending those letters! I have to go tell Blaise!" She bounced out of the room cackling like the tiny little madwoman she was.

Mirabella, who had been standing frozen in a corner since he'd identified the Dark, collapsed into a chair. "Bloody _hell_."

Sirius, unable to really think through the implications of what had just happened — and _entirely _unwilling to try — crept forward to fall onto Bella's vacated sofa. "You have to admit, that was the most _Bellatrix_ thing you've _ever _seen," he said. It was the first thing that came to mind. Well, that and, at least now he didn't have to talk about his marriage prospects.

"She's not Bellatrix," the witch said, rather absently. "That would _cause all manner of confusion_." Was– Was that an admission?! It sounded like — one implying that not only was "Lyra" Bellatrix, but also that she knew the _other_ Bellatrix was still alive! (Which of course, she knew, but hadn't really _confirmed_ that she knew.) "But yes, it is hard to see the differences, sometimes." She gave him a rather nostalgic, dreamy-eyed smile. "If she _was _Bella, though, her reaction might have been the most _child-like_ thing I've ever seen from her, even when we _were _children." She sighed. "_So_ adorable."

"You know, your thing with Bella was creepy even when you were the same age."

"Oh, shut up. Lyra just...reminds me of simpler times, I suppose." Then she groaned, burying her face in her hands. "Crouch is going to _kill _me. And Bones. And Fudge. And _Dumbledore_..."

"Yeah, make sure you take a picture when you tell the Old Goat that an embodiment of the Darkness Itself will be sharing a table with him for the judging."

Mira groaned again, very dramatically. "Oh, _fuck_ _me_..."

"Is that an invitation?" he asked, completely automatically. He _certainly _hadn't expected her to take it seriously, looking up and eyeing him like _that_— Not that he was _complaining_. The past thirteen years hadn't made Mirabella any less of a fox.

"I'm a married woman, now, Sirius," she said, smirking, in a tone that was _definitely flirting._

"How much does that matter, on a scale of _eating you out_ to _forget I ever said anything_?"

She laughed at that, rose to her feet and headed for the door without responding. Sirius sighed. At least his teasing had cheered her up a bit. It wasn't like he'd actually expected it to go anywhere. So it was a legitimate surprise when, half a second later, she stuck her head back through the doorway.

"Are you coming or not?"


	5. So, young man, where am I staying?

"Yes, yes, is there anything else, Minerva?" Albus asked, unable to keep a certain degree of trepidation from his tone.

Over the past two weeks, in the wake of the _disaster_ that was Harry Potter's kidnapping, everything, and he did mean _everything_, had gone wrong. He was under attack on all fronts, from political machinations in the Wizengamot and suggestions that he was beginning to show his age undermining his followers' faith in his leadership; to international contacts questioning whether Britain was truly as safe and well-recovered from the War as he had assured them — Gresham had even suggested that they _cancel the World Cup_, less than two months from the event; to that trollop _Zabini_ and _her_ office attempting to push through new staffing requirements, maximum class sizes, safety inspections...

She was working with Narcissa Malfoy and the Black girl, Albus _knew_ it, he just had no way to _prove _it, and even if he did, though he hated to admit it, no authority to stop them. It was perfectly _legal_ for the (underage) "Acting Head" of a Noble House to hide the fact that they _were_ an Acting Head from the Wizengamot— (He still couldn't _believe_ the audacity of _that_ particular play — he had thought Andromeda Tonks was on _his_ side! She had been one of the _staunchest_ supporters of muggleborn rights over the past decade, _but clearly blood would tell,_ he thought bitterly.) —in order to collude with voting blocs other than their own and Ministry Department Heads to undermine him, even if it was entirely underhanded and _hardly _honorable. (The Hat, he thought, must be growing senile in its old age, because Lyra Black was _not_ a Gryffindor.)

And even if Zabini _didn't_ find some way to force him to dismiss half his staff and hire two additional professors for every core subject, he _still_ needed to find at least _one_ Defense Professor — he _always_ needed to find another Defense Professor — _and_ he'd just come from visiting St. Mungo's.

Sybil was...not well. In hindsight, the signs had been building for _months_, perhaps even years, they simply hadn't noticed, himself and everyone else who might have been able to intervene — too concerned with their own affairs or, as Severus freely admitted, simply _disinclined _to help the poor woman, whom he had characterised as having been _a paranoid, drunken fraud _even _before_ Albus had hired her. Severus had also (inadvertently, Albus thought, but one could never be certain with that boy) let slip his suspicions that there had been something of an organised campaign behind her breakdown, rather than the single, tragic incident which _appeared_ to have sparked it off — a series of malicious pranks designed to make it _seem _as though all of her predictions were coming true, and then when she began predicting ever-more-ridiculous scenarios ("_Do you recall, Albus, the morning when she claimed I was wearing _yellow_?"_) to make it seem as though she was _dictating _the events in question. Which, he supposed, in a way she had been, if the perpetrators had been working according to her 'orders'.

"The perpetrators" being Lyra Black, of course. He was _certain _that insufferable girl was behind it all, even if he couldn't prove it. And Severus was no help at all — _he_ had been genuinely amused by the campaign of harassment, much though he had tried to deny it.

Not, Albus thought, that he ought to be surprised. He _had_ joined the Death Eaters voluntarily, participated in their violent horrors as willingly as any of them. The sadistic pranking of an annoying but ultimately _harmless _woman into insanity _obviously _appealed to his sense of humor. And he had _not_ missed the way Severus had been treating the girl — snarky and disparaging, of course, but without the venom he normally reserved for Gryffindor students. If anything, he treated her like one of his precious little snakes, allowing her to enter the Slytherin Common Room freely and arguing against her expulsion when she'd been caught practicing runic casting in the school. He even suspected that Severus had colluded with at least one of her tricks — while he _had_ examined the prank potion she had dosed the school with, he had done nothing to help ameliorate the effects of its second phase, which had left the entire school (save Severus himself) with every appearance of having caught a cold for three days.

_And_ when she had loosed those camouflaged, music-projecting automatons upon the school, Severus alone among the staff had refused to participate in destroying the things, instead simply altering the ones he caught to make them play a different set of songs (in unison), and march through the dungeons in a regular pattern, rather than scuttling off at random. She'd dumped a basket of them in front of him in the staff room demanding to know what the hell they were supposed to be, to which he had replied (smirking, of course) that he'd thought the..._Beetles_(?) fit the insect motif of the automatons better than the various rock 'n' roll artists whose music _she_ had chosen. (She'd simply stared at him in shocked silence for a long moment before muttering _five points to Slytherin, your Honor_ and stalking out.)

It had been a mistake, forcing the two of them into each other's company for the entire month of December — Albus realised that now. Severus had, as intended, been made miserable by the loss of what little time he had to himself, but the girl's company had clearly begun to grow on him. Not surprising, in hindsight: much as the boy claimed that he and all of his former comrades had detested the girl's mother, he _obviously_ held a great deal of respect for her, even now. (The Unspeakables had told Albus how familiar the two Death Eaters still were with each other when he'd gone to verify her captivity.) If they had met under different circumstances, well... They _had _been very similar, when they'd been students. Both far too intelligent to relate to their peers, withdrawn and entirely disinterested in _being here_. (Disinterested in anything other than Tom, in her case, and Lily, in his, to be precise.) But he still had not anticipated that the girl would somehow win Severus over. He _hated_ children!

Albus blamed the misjudgment on the fact that he had not seen the similarities between the Black girl and her mother until it was far too late, too willing to overlook them in his determination not to judge the child for the sins of the parent.

It wasn't until she'd been sitting before him on her own ground, casually ignoring his political position and influence and the _law _and even the magic he had been flooding the room with, a tactic which he could _never_ remember failing to garner _some_ reaction (most often _intimidated _reactions), telling him — _him_ — to _go fuck himself_, grinning and threatening to destroy him in the political arena, escalating their argument _well _beyond the bounds of sanity, confident that she held _every _card of value in this game (her certainty and self-assurance utterly _infuriating_), that he'd seen _exactly _how similar she was to the Blackheart, in personality as well as appearance. She might be better able to hide it, more light-hearted and carefree than Bellatrix had been at her age, and more..._playful_, he supposed, but beneath that, _they were the same_.

Severus had once told him that the War, the entire thing, had been a game to her. Complex and entirely _real_, the stakes life and death, but a game nevertheless. Tom had seen it as a necessity, perhaps as somewhat of a lesson, making a point that he could not be dismissed or ignored or silenced, but Bellatrix... She had simply _enjoyed_ it, toying with him and the lives of their followers.

And now her daughter was doing the same, playing with him, but this time, rather than being unaware of the _game itself_, he was unaware of the _stakes_, the _purpose_ of it all. And despite that, he couldn't _not_ play — there was no feasible way for him to crush her immediately or simply refuse to engage, she would just keep _pushing_ until he must retaliate in _some_ way, or else be so undermined from every direction that he no longer _could_. And what was he going to do? He wouldn't — _couldn't _— simply call her out, defeat her in the open as he had Gellert. She was a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, for God's sake! He _could_ kill her with a single exchange of spells, but to do so would be to betray everything he believed in. (Not to mention, it would make him a monster, and her a martyr.) And she knew it. He'd fallen into their trap, hers and whoever was directing her, underestimated them — he hadn't even seen it _coming_.

He had _certainly_ underestimated the girl's ability to subvert all those around him, her corrupting influence encouraging the darkness that lurked in all men's hearts, no matter how stringently they might attempt to deny it (or, in Severus's case, not even pretend to make such an attempt), to flourish.

She had even managed to turn _Sirius_ against him!

The House of Black had already been in decline by the time Albus had come into power, in the wake of Gellert's war, but he was beginning to understand _exactly _why the other Noble Houses — even the Darkest of them — had been so willing, even _eager_, to see the Blacks fade into obscurity in the 1980s. He could only _imagine_ how much more disruptive an entire _House_ of Blacks — Blacks who had (unlike Arcturus) actually been engaged in Magical British politics and the blood feuds and honor duels of the nobility, Blacks who went around adopting muggleborns and doling out money to even the most subversive of causes on a whim and riding roughshod over the objections of their peers — must have been. It was quickly becoming apparent that even _one_ was _incredibly problematic_ and entirely resistant to any sort of _handling_.

Which _did_ raise the question who the _hell_ was behind the bloody child — she couldn't possibly be working alone, but he could hardly _imagine_ her following anyone else's direction — and what they wanted, not to mention the question of what _Bellatrix_ was doing, and how her escape was related to her daughter's sudden appearance — because he couldn't imagine they weren't _somehow_ related — and how he was supposed to prepare for her inevitably returning Tom to power when the girl had hidden Harry Potter away and refused to give him back!

The issue had become _especially _pressing since Severus had informed him of his meeting with Harry and Zabini — apparently the boy was now slipping into Tom's mind in his sleep, which was... The similarities between Harry and Tom which had seemed so superficial when Harry had brought his concerns to Albus after escaping the Chamber of Secrets were quickly coming to seem not so very superficial at all. Legilimency was a _rare_ talent. Not as rare as some, but along with the Parseltongue... Albus was beginning to suspect that there was more to the soul magic Lily had used on her son than he had initially imagined. What, precisely, she had meant to do and how, he had no idea, but... Lily, for all her intuitive understanding of the more...esoteric magics, had been _young_. There had been no time, no possible _way_ for her to test her ritual, and soul magic was _notoriously _fraught with unintentional side-effects.

And he couldn't even _attempt_ to investigate the situation more fully, since Severus hadn't managed to convince the boy to stay in Britain. Their meeting had taken place at the Zabinis' residence! He had been _in the country_ — and Severus hadn't even _tried_ to stop him flooing away again, escaping before Albus even realised he was _back_. When Albus had rebuked the dark wizard, he had had the gall to act _surprised_ that Albus would have expected him to do such a thing! _And_ the fact that Zabini had been with him was no help at all in tracking Harry down. Apparently the boy had admitted that he was travelling with the Blacks for some part of the summer (because his mother was so _very busy with Department business, I'm sure you understand, Professor_), but he hadn't given a single hint as to _where_, precisely, they had gone. And of course Severus hadn't happened across the information while he was viewing the memory of Harry's...dream? Vision?

He had admitted that he _could_ have arranged to do so easily enough, but "_I can't believe I'm saying this, Dumbledore, but I actually agree with the boy is safer on the move than he would be here, and what would you do if you had him here anyway? Tell him to keep practicing his occlumency and start trying to achieve a lucid dreaming state, I imagine, since I _am _somewhat more familiar with mind magic, and that is precisely what _I _told him to do." _And Albus could _hardly _fault Severus for refusing to use legilimency in a _thoroughly _unethical manner, much as it might have been convenient _had _he done so, just this once.

Yet there was still a nagging suspicion at the back of his mind, that Severus was not so firmly on his side as Albus had once thought. Yes, he had sworn to follow Albus, to obey his orders, until Tom was entirely destroyed, but Albus was becoming uncomfortably aware how loosely such a vow might bind a clever, conniving man such as Severus. He could hardly imagine and countermand every way the Slytherin might think of to avoid or undermine his orders and, like the Black girl, the only common cause Albus truly shared with him was the safety of Harry Potter. If another faction happened to establish itself with which he found himself more closely aligned, well... He _had_ managed to betray Tom, and the brand his Lord had placed on his very _soul_ held him _far_ more securely than any vow might. Would Albus even _know_, if Severus began informing on him to the Black girl and her handlers? Had he perhaps even begun to do so already?

_No, Albus — you're beginning to sound as paranoid as Alastor. Even to yourself. _The only way to get through this was to focus on the problems he could solve, not waste his time pondering questions to which he might never find the answers, jumping at shadows and imagining elaborate, _Quibbler_-worthy conspiracies against himself. (Though he was quite certain Xeno _had_ been attempting to damage his reputation with that bloody article about his attempting to legilimise the Granger girl — there was going to be a bloody _hearing_ about it!)

_One problem at a time_, he reminded himself.

He had just come from St. Mungo's, and a conference which had left him feeling more helpless and exhausted than an entire day of back to back interviews and meetings at the Ministry.

The mind healer working most closely with Sybil, encouraging her recovery from her Black-induced psychotic break, was hopeful that she would be able to return to an independent life outside of an institution, perhaps as soon as the end of the summer, if he could simply convince her that she had, in fact, been the victim of a "gaslighting" campaign, rather than cursed unknowingly with godlike powers to dictate the fate of the universe. Thus far, he had been unable to coax her into making a prediction to prove to her that she was _not_ controlling the outcome of the event in question. Albus, likewise, had been unable to convince her that Harry Potter wasn't dead — or rather, she claimed she had predicted _that_ as well, in the hope that she could reverse whatever tragedy she had caused to make him believe the boy dead, thus only proving that she _did_, in fact, have some power over life and death and fate itself. The healers _had_, at least, managed to get her to speak again — she had refused for nearly a week after Albus's previous visit, terrified that anything she might say would become true — but he wasn't deluding himself that she would be fit to teach again by September, if ever.

Which meant that, in addition to a new Defense Professor — the _fortieth _Defense Professor he'd hired since refusing to appoint Tom Riddle to the position in 1961 — Albus needed to find a new Divination Professor, and unfortunately interviewing potential staff members was not a duty he could delegate to Minerva or Severus. (Though he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to delegate _anything_ to Severus at the moment, given his apparent sympathy for Black and her agenda...whatever that agenda might be.) Which meant even less time for him to deal with the myriad problems which had sprung up at the end of June.

"Ah, just one other," Minerva replied, rather hesitantly, consulting a bit of parchment. "A...Kyrah Shirazi came to my office just before you returned, asking about the Divination position. I wasn't certain whether you intended to... Well, in any case, she said she would prefer to wait rather than return later, so I had an elf escort her to your office."

That...was... Well, that was very _odd_, was what that was. Hadn't he just been thinking about that very problem? The timing was... Could it be possible that he actually had an applicant who knew what she was doing in the subject she was applying to teach? A novel idea, but... He couldn't imagine how _else_ she had so perfectly timed her arrival here, he had only _just_ decided that he _would _have to find someone to fill the position, and— "Very good, Minerva. I shall proceed there directly. Thank you."

* * *

When Albus strode into his office, an apology for keeping the applicant waiting already on his lips, he was greeted by Fawkes's warbling, images and feelings washing over him, giving an impression of difficulty and tenuousness — a turning point, perhaps, though without more context he could hardly guess what event the phoenix might be referring to. He looked to the bird's perch, only to find it empty, as a voice spoke from behind him.

"Good afternoon, Percival."

A stately, middle-aged witch stood before the fire, watching him with a wry smirk on her face and his phoenix on her shoulder. Her simple white robes, the hem and cuffs heavily embroidered with blue geometric designs, and the elaborate chignon into which her chestnut hair had been arranged lent her an air of distant sophistication, though this was greatly undermined by the laughter in her voice.

"No greetings for an old friend, Percy?" she said, her smirk blossoming into an honest, open grin.

Greetings? He could hardly manage to speak her name. "Perenelle? But I– I thought..."

"You thought I was dead." She sighed. "You weren't wrong. I had no intention of returning to Perenelle Flamel, but I received the most _intriguing_ letter a few weeks ago, and, well... I could hardly refuse the opportunity to be involved in a Triwizard Tournament, could I?"

"But— You're _not _dead? But, the Stone... I thought..." But it _was_ Perenelle — she was the _only _person who called him Percival, the only one who _knew_ that (aside from Nicolas, of course), and Fawkes obviously trusted her, but...

She frowned at him, her brow furrowing in disapproval, lips pursed ever so slightly (ever so _familiarly_). "Yes, well, that's what you get for meddling. Not that you truly affected the plan in any way, it did work out in the end, but if you'd simply let the Shadow steal the bloody bauble from the goblins, you could have avoided all that nasty guilt, you know."

"What? But, Nicolas — is Nicolas still—?"

"Nicolas? Nicolas never _was_." She clicked her tongue impatiently. "Sit _down_ dear boy, before you _fall _down, you're white as a sheet. _Go to him, lovely_," she added, whispering the last to Fawkes in his own language. He fluttered obligingly over to Albus, crooning reassurances in his ear as he sank into an armchair.

"I'm... I'm afraid I don't understand, Perenelle — how is this possible? How are you...? What do you _mean_, Nicolas _never was_?" His voice cracked on the last two words, tears slipping freely down his cheeks. Nicolas had— He had been more than a mentor to Albus, he had been the one who had...helped him find his way, after Gellert. Who had brought him back to earth, to see the everyday struggles of _life_ and _people_, rather than the _greater _struggle of good and evil his old friend had represented. He was, in many ways, the father (or perhaps grandfather) Albus had never had — open and supportive in a way his own parents hadn't been, though he had never allowed Albus to deceive himself about his own motives and desires; warm, but stern; disdainful of any self-delusion, yet patiently forgiving of mistakes...

Nicolas was the man Albus tried to emulate, as the Leader of the Light.

He couldn't _never have been_.

The witch clicked her tongue again. "You want to hear it from him?" she asked, her face shifting abruptly to portray her husband's features.

Albus reared back in his chair, shock and surprise very nearly overwhelming him. Were it not for Fawkes on his shoulder, he might, he thought, have found himself doing something regrettable, already so on edge as he was — his wand had appeared in his hand without any conscious movement on his part, leveled itself at...

"Going to curse me, my boy? You always _were_ so quick to overreact..."

That was _definitely _Nicolas — a Nicolas sitting there with all too smug an expression on his face, wearing his wife's robes, but his old mentor nevertheless. "I— You're a _metamorph_? But— Was it just Nicolas, then, who—"

"Quick to overreact, and slow to listen. Hear me now, boy. There _was_ no Nicolas Flamel — or Perenelle, really, though she's closer to the person I was born. The Philosopher's Stone was a ruse as surely as Flamel, a necessity, in my youth, if I was to remain a single person, rather than constantly running, leaving my life and loved ones behind to hide my immortality. That gets old after a century or two," he — _she_ — informed him dryly, before giving him a rather nostalgic grin. "The Fourteenth Century was a very different time, a time when it was more acceptable to be a selfish alchemist who had discovered the secret to eternal life and refused to share it than a child simply born immortal — in my first life, I was thought to be a changeling, or perhaps a demon. Those early years were...not pleasant."

"But, but I _lived_ with you — for _years_! And I — Nicolas and Perenelle, they were — _you _were? — separate people!"

"They were separate _characters_," Nic— _Perenelle_ said, her features shifting back. "You don't think you live to be my age without perfecting the art of illusion, do you? And of course, it would have been _entirely _improper for you to go _touching_ another man's wife — there was no cause at all for you to realise that Perenelle was never _tangible_ when she and Nicolas were in the same place at the same time." She gave him one of those so-casual, disaffected little shrugs she always had. "Don't feel bad, boy, you weren't the only one I fooled. In fact, I had no intention of revealing myself at all. If I hadn't gotten that letter, the Flamels would have died back in April, the characters killed off with no one the wiser, allowing me to move on, do something _different_ for the first time in _centuries_."

"You— What letter? Why are you here?"

_Why are you here, telling me everything I ever thought I knew about you was a lie? Why did you let me believe you dead? Why are you telling me now that you _aren't_?_

She gave him a coy smile. "Well, you see, Percy, I heard you might be in need of a new Divination Professor for this coming term and, since I had already decided to come for the Tournament, I thought I might volunteer my services. I do, if you recall, have some small skill in the art, and it has been _far _too long since I've had the joy of guiding young minds."

"Ah...of course? That is...I do need a Divination Professor, but surely you—"

"Don't you go telling me what I want or don't want, young man, I'm quite sure I've a better insight into that than you."

"Yes, Ma'am," Albus said, accepting the chastisement with a slight grimace. Perenelle always _had _had a way of making him feel like an errant child. A rather novel feeling, now, over half a century after they'd first met, when everyone around _him_ had begun to seem like a child in comparison. "But... You're here for the Tournament?"

"Yes, well, I always _did_ enjoy watching the students show off for each other." Of course, she would remember the _original_ Triwizards, Albus realised. The depth of time the Flamels' lives represented had always been a rather difficult thing for him to grasp. "I missed the first one, and the one in Sixteen Twelve, but I've managed to attend every other. I could _hardly _miss the revival — it's been, what? two centuries? Time _does_ fly, doesn't it?

"I wouldn't have come as _Perenelle _if I hadn't been invited to judge the thing, of course. I'm sure you can imagine my surprise, receiving a letter addressed to 'The Metamorph Sometimes Known as Perenelle Flamel'. _I_ was under the impression that my secret was well-kept, you see, hardly the sort of thing to be bandied about the Wizengamot."

"_What?_"

"Oh, don't worry, dear boy, I know _you _weren't the one who outed me — you never were _that _good at occlumency, I have no doubt that your shock is entirely genuine. But _someone_ told the young Lady Black who and what I am, and I _would_ rather like to know _who_."

Of course.

_Of course_ it had been Black. Who _else_ would it have been? All the things going wrong in his life, up to and including this– this world-shaking revelation, that one of the people he had trusted and respected above all others, had _lied_ to him, over the course of their entire association, came back to that _infernal_ child, in the end.

"So, I am here to investigate. As well as to help judge your tournament and teach Divination. The _old_ methods of Divination, of course — _anyone_ can teach Divination _charms_. It will do your students good, I think, to contemplate the _deeper_ magics a bit. Everything _has_ become _so_ refined these past few centuries, hardly anyone truly appreciates their magic at all. So, young man, where am I staying?"

"Here, of course," Albus said, almost without thinking. But... "But, Perenelle—"

"Call me Kyrah," she interrupted, her face shifting again, this time forming a sharp nose and pointed chin; wide-set, almond-shaped eyes coloured an impossible gold, much lighter than the brown of her skin; and hair gone silver as though with age, despite the unlined youthfulness of her face. Her ears, he noticed, as she tucked an errant strand behind one, were ever-so-slightly pointed. "I thought it would be fun to be a peri for a while, it's been so long since I played a truly _exotic _character."

As far as Albus knew, there hadn't been a peri sighting in _centuries_ — none of the more civilized fae races had been heard from for longer than he'd been alive. Peri had mostly lived around Persia, Parthia, Bactria, and extending a bit into Armenia, if he remembered correctly. Was she planning on teaching primarily Near Eastern divination techniques? Because that might be... No, there would be plenty of time to discuss that later, he decided. "Er...Kyrah, then. I'm afraid I don't understand — the judges were determined months ago, and—"

"And as I said, a representative of the Wizengamot contacted me, inviting me to join the judges' panel. I believe I'm meant to discuss the specifics with the Head of International Magical Cooperation? But I happened to be looking into the potentialities of attending, and your need for a Divination professor came up, so I thought I'd drop by and speak to you first. I trust I did get the timing right?"

"Well, _yes_, I had just decided to begin searching, but— The letter, inviting you to judge, do you still have it? May I see it?"

She blinked at him for a brief moment, as though she couldn't imagine why he should want to see it, but after that moment, pulled it from her sleeve, a tightly wrapped scroll. It was tied closed with a grey ribbon, and there were still bits of wax clinging to cloth and parchment where it had originally been sealed. Black, glittering with flecks of silver. He stripped it open to reveal a rather short letter, written in extremely archaic French. Not _entirely _indecipherable, but sufficiently foreign that his eyes took in the signature at the bottom — _Lyra Bellatrix Aradia Ankaa, Lady Regent, NMA House Black, on behalf of the Lords and Ladies of the Council of Celtic Peoples _— before the meaning of any of the text.

"Would you like me to tell you what it says?" Perenelle asked, after watching him puzzle over it for a moment.

Albus sighed. "If you would. I'm afraid my Old French is a bit _rusty_."

She laughed, a giggle somehow both low and tinkling, flicking her fingers in such a way as to say _give it back, then_. "It's addressed, as I said, to the Metamorph Sometimes Known as Perenelle Flamel — the direct translation is Fae-Touched, which is, in fact, how we were described back then. I have to say, I'm a bit impressed, that's hardly common knowledge. Not to mention, it suggests that this isn't the work of a translation charm. She obviously put some research into the thing. In any case, there is a fairly standard greeting; a short explanation to the effect that the Tournament is being revived; a bit of flattery, explaining why she chose to invite _me_ to judge — my expertise in traditional witchcraft, apparently. Potions and alchemy, healing, illusion, scrying and mind magic, weatherworking, _et cetera_. Let's see...

"'The Tournament will be judged by a panel of seven, including the Heads of the three participating schools, and four others chosen for their varied expertise and impartiality. There will be nine events, scheduled for the following dates' — and then there's a list, of course. 'Judges are also invited to attend the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, as well as the Yule Ball, which will be held on the evening of the twenty-fifth of December.' And then a reiteration of the bit about fostering diplomacy and international relations, good will, and whatnot, and a bit discussing logistics, or rather, noting that the logistics will be taken care of by International Cooperation, and requesting a response so that they might contact an alternate judge, if I wished to decline to participate.

"Which I most certainly have no intention of doing, though I _have_ yet to officially accept. Have you any idea who the other judges might be?"

Why would he? Apparently he didn't know much about _anything_ that was going on lately! Though honestly, if there truly _had _been a change such as that, he would have expected _someone_ to inform him — Ludo, perhaps, or Bartemius, since they were the judges whose positions had supposedly been eliminated, or any number of other contacts in the Ministry, it was hardly as though his involvement in the Triwizard project was unknown.

"Aside from Igor, Olympe, and myself, I had been, until your arrival, under the impression that there would be only _two_ other judges — Bartemius Crouch and Ludo Bagman, Ministry representatives. I _do _think I would have been informed had there been any major changes to the judging panel, so... I'm sorry to say, Pere– _Kyrah_, but I'm afraid you may have been the target of some sort of practical joke — one in _very _poor taste, but that _would_ be in character for Miss Black. She— I have no idea what to do with that girl, truth be told. I have _never_ met a more infuriating child."

Perenelle hummed under her breath for a moment. "Are you sure the joke isn't on _you, _Percy? It is my understanding that the Acting Lady Black is a Hogwarts student — it is entirely possible she simply wished to win the Cup fairly, rather than with the help of an unbalanced panel of judges."

What was _that_ supposed to mean? Yes, Ludo would likely favor the Hogwarts champion, but Albus was quite certain that he and Bartemius were entirely capable of judging fairly and impartially!

"I suppose it's possible the joke _is _on me, somehow, I can't claim to understand the game she's playing whatsoever, but— Are you implying that her motive might be a desire for fair competition? Forgive me, but I _hardly _think— If you'd met her, you would realise fair play is hardly a major concern for her — rather the opposite, in fact. And in any case, only students who will be of age by the first of November will be allowed to volunteer. Seventeen," he added, in response to the way her head cocked to the side in confusion. "We _have_ taken precautions, of course, but with the historical dangers of the Tournament, it was agreed that students must be legal adults to participate." Which the Black girl _must_ have realised, if she'd somehow gotten sufficient access to their plans to attempt to change the bloody judges' panel.

Perenelle scoffed slightly, rolled those inhuman, golden eyes at him. "Well, I can hardly say I agree with _that_. The Goblet chooses the _best _Champion to represent the school. If that Champion happens to be a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old chosen over your 'legal adults', it's a fair bet they'd be better able to survive the contest than the older student, isn't it? Next you're going to tell me that Champions are going to be forbidden to cheat and sabotage each other!"

That... _What?!_ "Of _course_ cheating is forbidden, that's what makes it _cheating_."

Perenelle sighed. "No, _no_, not— Of course, you wouldn't understand, you see... The Tournament is about far more than the _tasks_ and the students' overt performance in the arena. Cheating is a time-honored tradition, anyone who attended any of the old Tournaments would tell you that." So, anyone more than two centuries old. "The penalties are, of course, severe, if one is caught, but it's part of the game. And it's more a team effort than you might expect. If you're doing it _properly_, the children of all three schools will be attempting to sabotage the others' Champions and protect their own. All without letting on to the judges and organisers what they're up to. Of course, everyone _knows_, but we're meant to turn a blind eye so long as the children aren't _very _obvious about it. However, the field itself must afford each Champion an even starting point. Three British judges is simply not sporting. And I daresay Miss Black would think it rather unsatisfying to win a Tournament rigged in her favor. Granted, I haven't met the girl, but it would hardly be the first time a Black gave up an advantage just to make the outcome of a game less certain."

"Miss Black is only _fourteen_, Perenelle, she won't be participating! Even if she _did_ manage to enter herself, I hardly think even such an arrogant, maddening little chit as _her _would expect to be chosen above students with three years' advantage over her in their studies."

"Kyrah," she corrected him. "And given the recent obsession with this _childhood_ concept, I would be _shocked_ to find that more than a handful of your seventeen-year-olds have more experience practicing magic than a fourteen-year-old Black. There _is _a reason they've won, what, eighteen Tournaments, since the fifteen-hundreds? But that's _hardly _the point, here. I'm quite certain the invitation is legitimate, and even if it's not...do you _really _think the other organisers will turn me away, if I volunteer to judge? I don't, and I dare say this revival of yours could benefit from the council of someone more familiar with the particulars of the tradition."

Which...was a point, Albus supposed. One to which he had nothing to say in response, as it was so unexpected a point for Perenelle to make, but a point nevertheless.

She grinned. "I've only ever been a spectator, you know. Only Perenelle and Nicolas would have had the social standing and reputation to be considered as potential judges, and it wouldn't have been in character for either of them to volunteer, but as I've been invited and breaking character is hardly a consideration any longer in any case, I see no reason whatsoever _not_ to participate."

"Well, you _are_ legally _dead_," Albus said, unable to keep a rather annoyed edge out of his tone. "If nothing else, I expect everyone will want you to stick around to answer a few questions."

"Oh, pish. _I'm _not really dead. Perenelle and Nicolas, yes, but the goblins still recognise me as myself. How did you think the girl got the letter to me in the first place?"

That... He hadn't even considered it, really. Not in the face of... "How could she possibly have known that you are a metamorph? Even _I_ didn't know that!"

"Well, I _did_ mention I was here to investigate that very question, did I not? In any case, I doubt anyone will be terribly surprised to discover I'm not as dead as they were led to believe. Exaggerated rumors _do_ seem to be going around, don't they. Well, I suppose it's not common knowledge, yet, that the latest Bellatrix Black is still alive, but I hardly expect her to keep a low profile for very _long_. Still."

"How do you know, about Lestrange?" Albus asked immediately, ignoring the implied jab at his mishandling of the Harry Potter situation. Had she heard something, some rumor of where the cursed woman might be?

"What? That she's not dead? I _asked_, silly boy. Death may not look kindly on those of us who refuse to die, but that doesn't mean I'm _entirely _incapable of the most elementary necromancy!"

Albus winced. He was _aware_ that Perenelle and Nicolas both — or rather, he supposed, the metamorph sitting before him — had dabbled rather extensively over the course of their lives — _life_ — in magics far darker than he could truly bring himself to condone. Many of them were simply disciplines that had been outlawed in the centuries since they'd been born, but some, like Necromancy, were truly _magically _dark. He had left Alchemy entirely when he'd realised the sort of experiments he would have to carry out to truly understand the deepest aspects of the discipline. That Nicolas — wise, grandfatherly Nicolas — _had_ obviously delved into bioalchemy alongside the traditional art was one of the things that had been most difficult for Albus to reconcile about his character, but he'd eventually come to understand, in the wake of Gellert's war, that it was possible for one to still, fundamentally, be a good person, even if one had done terrible things. There might very well have _been _no war without Albus, but _he _certainly wasn't dark.

Perenelle — _Kyrah _— smirked, as though she knew _exactly _what he was thinking. "Don't be squeamish, boy, there's nothing wrong with asking the Powers a question now and again. It's all Magic, when it comes down to it."

That was another thing they'd never agreed on: both Nicolas and Perenlle had held to the old superstitious idea that Magic was a conscious entity of some sort — a god, in essence. Albus himself believed that the Powers were simply a manifestation of magic based on the expectation of the mage invoking them, not any sort of autonomous consciousness. Not that it mattered, really, there was no real _proof_ either way.

Before he could think of a response to the accusation of squeamishness, Perenelle changed the subject, musing, "Maybe _she _was the one who told the young Lady Black that I'm a metamorph. Bellatrix, I mean."

Albus somehow managed to choke on air at the implication that (as he asked, disbelieving, when his coughing fit abated), "_Bellatrix Lestrange_ knew?!"

"Well, she never _said _anything, but Tom Riddle always was a slippery little shite, I wouldn't be surprised if he found a way around that vow of secrecy. She _was_ his Lady, wasn't she? It could have come up." Albus simply _stared_ — he couldn't _possibly _have just heard her correctly. But it seemed he had, as she added, "Come now, Percy, you didn't think you were my _only _apprentice, did you?"

"Well, _no_, of course not! But— _Tom Riddle_? And you told _him_," _but not me_, he avoided adding, though only just.

"Oh, well, I _wouldn't_ have if he'd just wanted to study the Art, but he'd got it into his head that he was going to learn my secret and stay young and pretty as well as immortal — and when I kept putting off discussing the Stone at all, he eventually resorted to violence. And, well, I've never been a fighter, so yes, I swore him to secrecy and made him vow to leave peacefully and never bother me again after I told him, in exchange for the secret. He was _livid_ when he realised he'd spent three months flattering an old man for nothing at all. Now, granted, I don't _know_ that he found a way to tell his Bellatrix, she was a bit preoccupied on the one occasion I met her, it didn't come up. But he might very well have done."

"Wait — then why did he want to steal the Stone, when I had it here?"

"Well, I suppose it's possible that in his madness, he's forgotten the truth of the matter. But it's also possible he realised that it wasn't _completely _useless — it was a catalyst that could be used to create a panacea which reinforces one's fundamental identity, which had all sorts of interesting effects, most of which _were_ completely useless. Some, however, might potentially have been very useful if, for example, one had used multiple horcruxes to secure one's soul on the mortal plane without becoming trapped in the horcrux object and, finding oneself a wraith in need of a body, wished to avoid corrupting a vessel while possessing it. It just wasn't the Elixir of Life."

Albus tried to suppress the flare of emotion that arose on hearing _that_. Nicolas had never told him anything about the Stone, either, and Albus had been his apprentice for _years_. But it wasn't as though he'd told Tom voluntarily, there was really no call for jealousy. "I...see. And — dare I ask — _Bellatrix_...?"

"Came looking for Perenelle. Shadow-walked straight into the salon and half-threatened, half-begged my assistance in restoring Riddle's sanity — I understand one of your young Phoenixes twisted a ritual back on him?" Lily. It had to have been Lily. "Unfortunately for everyone, I couldn't help her, _tynghedau_ are tricky like that. The one who casts it must uncast it, unless the one who's cursed manages to find the solution himself, and I understand the girl responsible was unwilling to undo it. And of course, due to the circumstances of the casting, Bellatrix didn't know what the solution might be. And then Riddle killed the girl, so as I understand it, he's trapped now as a parody of himself, the ridiculous madman your propaganda made him out to be. Forever." That...actually explained rather a lot. Especially the speed with which the war had gone to pot in the last two years of it... "Honestly, he did rather set me against him when he decided that torturing me for information on the Stone was a far more efficient option than sweet-talking it out of me, but I wouldn't have wished _that_ fate on him. Perhaps Bellatrix will put him out of his misery, now that she's left your demon prison."

Albus sighed. "Who can say what that madwoman will do now? As far as I know, there have been no reports of her washing up in Britain or France. The I.C.W. would certainly have contacted me, even if they would refuse to extradite her. Though I wouldn't put it past the Black girl to somehow be in contact with her. Or rather, for whoever is behind her to be in contact with both of them."

"Whoever is behind her?" Perenelle repeated. "What makes you think someone is behind her? I'll admit that the letter is somewhat impressive, I doubt she actually speaks _François_, but it's nothing that would require outside assistance to produce, and I _sincerely _doubt that anyone would need to put her up to it."

"Not _this_, not necessarily. But... How much time do you have?" he found himself asking, desperate to talk to _someone_ about this. And Nicolas, even wearing an entirely different face and speaking more frankly than Albus had ever heard, was still so _very _easy to talk to. At the very least he — _she _— would be able to tell him whether he'd already completely lost his mind.

The metamorph's face fell into a concerned-looking Perenelle. "Oh, dear — that bad, is it? Do we need tea?"

He called for an elf, because yes, he rather thought they _did_ need tea.

* * *

_And we finally meet the last of our surprise judges. And it's someone who's actually on Dumbledore's side! Or, you know, at least someone who can counterbalance the effects of Lyra's existence and help him keep his head on straight. She just so happens to be a Triwizard Tournament super-fan because, well, it amuses the hell out of me._

_Perenelle/Nicolas being a metamorph is part of Lysandra's headcanon. The original plan to get rid of the Stone and kill off the characters involved hiring a vampire thief to steal it from Gringotts'. When Dumbledore got wind of the rumors that it was in danger, he offered to protect it himself. Perenelle agreed because, well, the Gringotts goblins wouldn't appreciate the 'unorthodox withdrawal' of her property being publicised as a breach of their security, and she prefers not to offend entire clans of goblins when possible. She didn't anticipate Tom trying to steal it and it incidentally being destroyed. If he hadn't, she might have still had it stolen from Dumbledore, or just waited until the danger was judged to have passed and tried again while it was in transport or something. —Leigha_

_Perenelle/Nicolas being a metamorph **is** from my headcanon, though that's not how the Stone ended up at Hogwarts in mine. Dumbledore just heard a rumor Tom was after it, and badgered the Flamel(s) about it until they threw a bauble at him just to get him to stop bothering them. It was just something they conjured to get rid of him, it wasn't anything. Because dammit, Albus, I'm trying to finish this paper, leave me alone. —Lysandra_

_The Council of Celtic Peoples is the official, internationally recognised name of the Wizengamot that no one ever uses. —Leigha_


	6. Go fuck yourself, Your Excellency

Sirius lowered himself to the very edge of a chair, every muscle tensed. If anyone had asked him how he might expect to feel, seeing Dumbledore again for the first time in nearly a dekatria, he probably would have said he'd be thrilled — he'd been so starved for human company for so long, he thought he might almost be thrilled to talk to _Snivellus_ in person again. (Almost. And only because he seemed to have grown a sense of humor since they'd left school — forcing Little Bella to mark Potions essays was much funnier than her getting that _stupid_ elf to lock him up in the nursery when she'd found him.)

But as soon as he'd come through the floo at Château Blanc — the name a reference to the confusion which had, or so the story went, surrounded the pronunciation of the family's name when their long-distant ancestors had immigrated to Britain — Sirius had realised that this was not going to be a happy reunion. The tone of Dumbledore's letters, which he'd sent a fair few, had been largely penitent, begging his forgiveness for the part he'd played in Sirius's stay in Azkaban, which Sirius had grudgingly given. (It wasn't as though _Dumbledore_ could be blamed for Sirius's weakness or the Rat's treason or Evans being too paranoid for her own good — _she_ was the one who insisted they couldn't tell their Fearless Leader that they'd changed Secret Keepers, Sirius still didn't know why.) The look on his face today, though, was one Sirius recognised from the war. He'd never seen it on Dumbledore before, but on Jamie and Marley and Frank and Alice, as they watched their friends die one by one, and there was no one to blame except each other and themselves and the entire bloody war.

Sombre. Hurt. Ever so slightly accusing. And _tired_.

"Who died?" he asked, even before offering a greeting, hating the trepidation in his tone, but unable to will it away.

"Sirius, I— We should sit," he said, even as Little Bella followed him out of the flames.

"Hey, Siri." Her characteristic nonchalance contrasted dramatically with Dumbledore's obvious distress.

"Bella, what's going on?" Her latest owl had arrived just yesterday — he'd already been in California, Harry and the Zabinis had showed up two days before, _finally_, and they'd _just _started to catch up — demanding that he meet her here, today, because Dumbledore wanted to talk to them (and for security reasons was under the impression that their summer plans were completely independent of the Zabinis', and they were staying on the continent somewhere). He'd spent twelve hours on a muggle aeroplane rather than take an international portkey (_never again_), and just floo'd in himself about two hours ago. "Didn't the school year end almost a week ago?"

She glared at him, but didn't 'correct' him, so she must have finally accepted that he wasn't going to call her by that stupid pseudonym when he knew who she really was. It was slightly surprising that Dumbledore didn't correct him either, but maybe he saw it, too. "It did, yes, but the academic calendar holds no sway over Poppy Pomfrey. She only let me out of the hospital wing this morning."

"Why were you in hospital?"

"That, my dear boy, is to do with the matter we need to discuss," Dumbledore said, motioning toward the door.

Bellatrix rolled her eyes, led the way into the corridor, calling back over her shoulder, "I was briefly kidnapped and tortured the day before we were supposed to come home."

Sirius nearly laughed at that, the idea of someone kidnapping and torturing _Bellatrix_, rather than the other way around. Not to mention it was fucking hilarious that someone had gotten the drop on her. _Don't laugh at the idea of teenagers being tortured in front of Dumbledore, Sirius_, he reminded himself, though he couldn't keep _all _of his amusement out of his response. "You were _what_?"

She spun on her heel to face them, continuing down the corridor without breaking stride, flipped him off. "You heard me."

"By _whom_?"

She shrugged. "Dunno. I was obliviated. And the list of people who _don't_ occasionally want to torture me is probably shorter than the list of people that do, so." That was...probably true. Sirius himself was admittedly on the latter list — Little Bella might not be as bad as the original, but trapping him indefinitely in a small suite of rooms was almost as bad as putting him back in a cell. "Anyway, it wasn't _that_ bad, they didn't do anything that couldn't be healed in a day or two, Pomfrey's just ridiculous. Didn't want me to strain myself in the last stages of blah, blah, blah." She spun around again, looking around the intersection they'd come upon as though she wasn't exactly certain where she was going, then shrugged slightly and set off to the left with every appearance of confidence. "And then there was a misunderstanding about Harry — he's fine, I'm..._pretty_ sure. Maïa's article said so, anyway, and I don't see any reason to doubt it, especially now that His Excellency here has changed sides. Oh, this one will do, I think."

The sitting room she'd led them to was one of the more completely furnished ones — which wasn't saying _much_, most of the Château wasn't furnished at all, Sirius had only been using a few rooms before he'd headed to the Americas, and restoring rooms he didn't need had seemed like _far _too much work. She plopped into a chair, kicking her feet up on the coffee table. "I'd offer tea, but I don't think we have an elf here. Kind of short notice, arranging this meeting, you see."

"What do you— What does she mean, you changed sides, Your Excellency?" He wasn't entirely certain _why _they were using Dumbledore's proper style of address, but he also didn't really think that was the important question at the moment. Obviously Harry was fine, but why would he think he _wasn't_?

Something rather pained flickered in Dumbledore's eyes. "There is no need to stand on ceremony, my dear boy. Not... Not after everything that has happened."

_Not after I left you in that hell hole for twelve fucking years, you mean_, Sirius thought, biting his tongue.

"He announced that Harry was dead, and then two days later announced that he actually isn't. Though apparently no one knows where he is, so he can't prove it, and the Aurors claim that the circumstances of his disappearance are suspicious, even though I'm..._pretty sure_ that my being abducted and tortured and Harry escaping incarceration in muggle suburbia are unrelated incidents. I mean I don't _know_, I _was _obliviated, but I will admit that breaking all the tracking charms on him and sending him home early _does_ seem like a thing I would do, since I _do_ recall that we were going to go on holiday as anonymously as possible, for his protection, you know. And Maïa says I was planning to, so."

Sirius stared blankly for several long seconds, wavering between outrage — why hadn't anyone told _him_ Harry was supposedly dead — and confusion — it would have been helpful if someone had told him at some point exactly how they were framing this holiday _thing_, because he had only the vaguest idea what their cover story was, and he was obviously meant to be supporting it — before breaking into uncontrollable sniggering. "Well, if you're looking for confirmation, he's definitely not dead. He was having breakfast at the hotel when I left."

"Oh, good, it would have been awkward if he'd gone and gotten himself killed while I was busy."

Busy. Being tortured. Sirius rolled his eyes. How she could expect anyone _not _to believe she was Bellatrix, he had no idea.

"Where is he? What hotel?" Dumbledore asked, a legilimency probe attempting to worm its way into his thoughts.

"Stay the _fuck _out of my head, Albus!" he snapped, disrupting the magic with a bit more force than entirely necessary, causing the old man to wince slightly, though he didn't apologise.

"You _did _just hear me say that the plan is to remain anonymous, did you not, Your Excellency?" Bellatrix said, her only acknowledgment of their byplay a calmly raised eyebrow.

"Sirius, my boy," the old man said, his tone nearly pleading, despite having just attempted to _take_ the information he wanted. "You must understand, Harry's safety, his security, is of the utmost importance, and there are forces... You _must _tell me, Sirius, it's for his own good."

Sirius gave him a considering hum, not that he needed to think about it. "_No_."

Dumbledore, apparently not expecting that answer, stared at him in shocked silence for a long moment. Sirius couldn't imagine _why_. Any personal loyalty he'd held for the man had long-since eroded under the influence of the dementors, and he couldn't _possibly_ believe that Sirius would _approve_ of sending _his godson_ off to live with _Lily's sister_. He wasn't _certain_, but he thought he might actually have let _Elizabeth _raise Harry before _Petunia_. Well, knowing what he knew now, at least.

Yes, James had always... Well, _hated_ was a strong word, but he'd never really gotten along with his older sister. He had never really known her that well. She was even older than Bella — the older one, not the little one, obviously — but she was a dark witch and ran off to France and married a veela, so he hadn't liked her on principle. And then he'd disowned her after she refused to come to Charlus (and Dorea)'s funeral. But Dorea had liked her — she'd once told Sirius that he reminded her of Liz, that most of her problems with Charlus and the House of Potter were that she just didn't quite fit in with them — and Sirius had always trusted Dorea's judgment, and Liz was, at the very least, a _witch_, and she knew what it meant for Harry to be the last Potter.

_Petunia_ on the other hand — Sirius had only met her once, but she'd been the most _mugglish_ muggle he'd ever met, taking _pride_ in how _boring_ and "normal" she and her husband were, disparaging James and Lily as freaks _on their wedding day_. (Behind their backs, of course, Lily would have hexed her if she'd heard.) It wasn't hard to believe she hadn't told Harry _anything_ about magic before he'd started school, and if she'd feared him so much after his _first year_ at Hogwarts that she'd felt the need to _lock him in his room_, it wasn't a far stretch to imagine she'd abused him badly enough as a child that she expected him to want retribution.

Of course, he would've picked almost anyone else before _either _of them, but that wasn't the _point_. The _point_ was, Dumbledore had put Harry in a terrible situation and insisted year after year that he return to it, despite Harry asking to go anywhere else — despite him _running away_ from the muggles _two years in a row_ — and it reminded Sirius of having to go back to Grimmauld Place every summer and he _hated _it. Even if this summer _hadn't _been his first real chance to get to know Jamie's son, he _certainly _wasn't about to tell Dumbledore where he was so he could drag him back and hand him over to an abusive cunt like Wal—

_Petunia_. An abusive cunt like _Petunia_. (_Walburga is dead_, he reminded himself. If there was any justice in death, her soul would burn in hell for eternity, the hideous bitch.)

"Sirius, my boy, I know— I know the House of Black has a– a vested interest in Harry, but surely you can see that it would be better, he would be safer—"

"I said _no_, Your Excellency," Sirius said sharply, putting on his best impression of Jamie's _Lord Potter _voice. "I _don't_ see that it would be safer to leave him a sitting duck under a blood ward that may or may not do _anything_ to protect him against the vast majority of his potential enemies. I don't see that it would be _better_ to drag him back to be your precious _Boy Who Lived_ — even Jamie would have drawn the line before letting you turn his son into a bloody celebrity for– for what? Because Lily saved his life with some esoteric ritual? In that case you can go ahead and lionise half the fucking Order! And _Lily_ would have killed you as well as Lord Snakefucker—" (Little Bella giggled at the name.) "—before she'd let you turn her _or_ her son into a bloody mascot for Light Unity."

That annoyed him. Probably because he knew it was true. "Lord Black," he said coldly, "while I understand that certain Magical British traditions may give your rights as Harry's godfather precedence over all others, and you certainly have a right to challenge my custody, you have _no _right to _abduct _him in defiance of the Wizengamot order remanding him into my care in Nineteen Eighty-One."

"Well if you'd actually _taken_ care of him and not just—"

"Point of order," Bellatrix interrupted (cutting him off with that _fucking _silencing jinx, _again_, but it was probably better if he didn't start shouting obsenities at Dumbledore anyway, the second it took for him to break it gave him time to remember that.) "Sirius isn't Lord Black. I'm the Acting Head of the House—"

"_Unofficial_ Acting Head," the Chief Warlock corrected her. "You _are _only fourteen, Miss Black."

Sirius let out an unamused bark of laughter. "_You_ signed her petition for my trial, and it's not as though there's anyone else to file a counter-claim, so until I'm cleared, she's the _de facto_ representative of the House as recognized by the Wizengamot, regardless of her age."

Dumbledore glared at him, as though Sirius was taking sides, here. He wasn't, it was _massively irritating_ that Little Bella was the Head of the House (even if he didn't much want the job himself), but he couldn't deny that it was _true_. It was an obscure technicality, but from what Andromeda had told him, if the Chief Warlock recognised an official petition presented by an self-proclaimed Acting Head of a Noble House on behalf of a subordinate member of the House, in the absence of a recognised representative from that house to hold their Seat or countersuit from another claimant to the title, the Wizengamot was obliged to officially recognize the Acting Head as countersigned, regardless of the age, species, or magical status as the claimant. _There was precedent._

(She had been almost unbearably smug when she'd explained it to him. So smug it had come across in her bloody _letter_, her delight at having slipped one past the Old Goat and his staff.)

_Technically, _Little Bella didn't even need him to be the legal Head of the House, now, she could just keep on as the Acting Head indefinitely and do whatever she wanted with the full political authority of the House behind her. Well, until someone realised they could amend that law to include a minimum age — it probably wouldn't be _that_ difficult to get enough votes to kick Little Bella out of the Wizengamot. She was _very _aggravating. He gave it maybe six months before everyone remembered why they'd been all too happy to let the House of Black die in Eighty-One.

"My dear boy, you can't truly mean to support her claim."

"It doesn't really matter if he supports it or not, at this point he's _persona non grata_, and it _is _legal. Meda may not be a Black anymore, but she's very good at what she does. But speaking of being fourteen, Harry is too, which means he's old enough to have opinions now. He _did _leave voluntarily, I wouldn't have forced him. If Siri tells you where he is and you drag him back to Britain, and we bring a case against you, I'm _pretty sure_ he'd choose to stay with us rather than his awful muggles. And publicly being rejected by your little National Treasure would look even worse than that little _misunderstanding _about his supposed death."

The temperature in the room rose a few degrees with the heat of the old wizard's anger. Bellatrix shivered under the sudden flare of light magic responsible, her glare nearly as fierce as his. Which, well, Lily _had _claimed Bella was a black mage, he wouldn't be surprised if the little version of her was, too. Dumbledore's little display of power probably hurt. Not that Sirius was about to tell him to tone it down, _she _was the one trying to make a power play as "the Acting Head of the House", she could deal with it herself if it bothered her that badly. Though he was _pretty sure_ she knew better than to get into a magical pissing match with someone as obviously powerful as Dumbledore. The older Bellatrix might stand a chance at forcing him to back down (_maybe_), but the little one hadn't quite grown into her power, yet.

"_Yes_," Dumbledore said, "regarding that _little misunderstanding_ — tell me, _Miss_ Black, if you simply intended to take Harry on holiday, why go to the trouble of sabotaging my monitoring charms? What _message_ were you and your..._handlers_ attempting to communicate?"

"Er...handlers?" Little Bella blinked at him in what Sirius was _certain_ was genuine confusion.

"Surely you don't expect me to believe that you have been working alone — or, as Miss Granger has suggested, that some ancient ward or another _just so happened_ to block those spells."

"I honestly have no idea what you're talking about, Your Excellency."

Dumbledore's voice grew as clipped and sharp as his glare. "I refer, _Miss_ Black, to the person or persons who raised you. Who trained you to the position you have so capably stepped into this past year. Who have been facilitating your acquisition of restricted reading materials and who deliberately designed a ward to give me the impression that Harry had died. Who accompanied Harry to the point from which he disappeared, after your path and his diverged. And what _precisely _they intended to accomplish in misleading me in such a way."

Sirius thought he caught a faint smile tugging at the corner of Bella's lips, but she quickly suppressed it, meeting Dumbledore's eyes with a coolly unimpressed expression. "The person or persons who raised me are dead, Your Excellency. Their identity is of no concern to you, or anyone, really. I've been officially recognised and registered as a Daughter of the House of Black, which is all anyone outside the House needs to know. And I don't exactly need someone to help me get books from my own bloody library. Well, unless you mean the house elf I ordered to fetch them. As far as I know, no one else was involved in Harry's escape, but then, I _was _obliviated. And your question doesn't even make sense, if someone _did _intentionally mislead you into believing Harry was dead, which, I haven't heard any evidence that they _did_, I'm guessing they...wanted you to think he was dead?"

Sirius couldn't help a snort of laughter at her tone of complete incomprehension at the last bit, especially since he was certain that she was implying that whatever political mess she'd caused was exactly what she'd meant to do. His amusement drew Dumbledore's attention back to him, his face a mask of stark disapproval.

Sirius flinched — disappointing Dumbledore usually meant he'd put people he cared about in danger. Well, sometimes it meant that he'd defended them a little too viciously — Dumbledore didn't like it when Order members killed Death Eaters, didn't want to escalate the conflict too far, seeing as they were outnumbered about twenty to one, as though the Death Eaters wouldn't already have killed every one of them, given the opportunity — but he hadn't really fought anyone for about thirteen years, so.

"Perhaps, Sirius, you fail to grasp the importance of Harry being returned to my custody for the same reason he was allowed to leave the castle unsupervised in the first place — the Black properties may be well-warded, but they would hardly keep out _one of their own_."

He was fairly certain that was intended to be cryptic and ominous, something to make Sirius say, _what do you mean_, but there were only three Blacks left, and two of them were sitting in this room, so it wasn't hard to figure out the implication at all.

"You mean..._Bellatrix isn't dead_?" he exclaimed, putting on what he thought was an appropriate degree of false shock and horror before reverting to more normal tones. "I already knew that." Her death had been announced in Tuesday's papers — Mirabella Zabini had told him when she and the boys had arrived — but he hadn't believed it for a second.

"You _knew_."

Sirius rolled his eyes at the old man's obvious suspicion. What, did he think Sirius had helped her escape? He didn't even know where they'd taken her, though if she had been in hospital, she couldn't have still been on Azkaban, they didn't have a healer there at all. "Quite frankly I'm surprised you expected anyone to believe the Unspeakables could have killed her, but yes, the Family Magic would have alerted us if she had died."

Well, it _might_ tell Little Bella, at least. It _should_, but Sirius didn't really know what it could do anymore, since it was well and truly broken. But it didn't really matter. After some of the shite he'd seen her pull in the war, he wasn't sure he'd believe Bella was dead even if he saw her hit with a fucking Avada. Some people, you _really _wanted a necromancer to confirm their souls had left the mortal plane.

Little Bella nodded. "It would've been better to say she just died of whatever happened to put her in hospital in the first place than to say it was an escape attempt that went wrong," she noted. "Though you'd still have the problem of what to tell everyone when it turns out _she's_ not dead _either_, because you can't _possibly _believe she's going to stay in hiding forever."

It sounded to Sirius like she was trying not to laugh. Which, well, now that she pointed out that Dumbledore seemed to be making a habit of announcing false deaths, he was trying not to laugh, too. Little Bella was much funnier than the other one. Which was kind of weird since he was _pretty sure_ she was actually a blood alchemy copy of the original. He would have expected their sense of humor to be similar.

(It had only taken him a few conversations with her to decide the blood alchemy theory made _much _more sense than the older one escaping and de-aging herself and worming her way into Gryffindor for reasons unknown, even if the little one hadn't admitted it yet. It was possible she didn't even _know_, but he doubted it, the resemblance was _impossible_ to miss.)

He cleared his throat, trying to focus on the conversation at hand. "If Bellatrix left Azkaban, it stands to reason that she's not waiting for her precious Master to come back for her anymore, and if she's not doing what she thinks he would want her to do, there's really no reason to think she'd be after Harry. But even if she was, that's all the more reason to keep him on the move, in disguise, rather than leaving him sitting in Little Whinging, completely vulnerable," Sirius insisted. That was, in fact, probably the best defense _any_ of them had against Bellatrix, if she decided she wanted to kill them (though Mirabella didn't seem to think she would, and she _did_ know his crazy cousin better than anyone). "That's what any Auror would tell you," he added, on a sudden stroke of inspiration. "You can ask Moody if you don't believe me." The paranoid old Auror had been Sirius's mentor, once upon a time, he was fairly certain he'd agree with Sirius's reasoning here.

For a moment, he thought Dumbledore was going to lose his temper, threaten to get a Wizengamot order to hand Harry over or something, but when he spoke, it was in that familiar, grandfatherly tone of disappointment, shaking his head ever so slightly. "It pains me, Sirius, to see you fall so far from the Light. I blame myself, of course — all those years, it's hardly any wonder you cannot bring yourself to trust my judgment any longer. But you have, you realise, confessed that you know the whereabouts of a minor who has been, to the best knowledge of the Aurors, abducted by persons unknown. Surely you can see that it would be in everyone's best interests if you return him to Britain to prove that he was not taken against his will, and, if you no longer trust _me_, consult with the Aurory to arrange his protection—"

Bellatrix sighed loudly, interrupting what admittedly sounded like a reasonable compromise — Sirius was _positive_ that the Aurors would agree that travelling anonymously was far safer for Harry than remaining anywhere in Britain, and it wouldn't really hurt to let him go back long enough to just make a statement — to say, "I'm going to stop you right there, Your Excellency."

"What is it, Miss Black?" Dumbledore asked patiently, clearly trying to be the adult in the situation, Sirius thought.

"It may be in _your _best interests to bring Harry back to Britain, prove to everyone he's still alive, salvage morale even if you still look like a bloody _idiot_ for telling everyone he was dead in the first place — I'm sure you'll find a way to work in the Boy Who Lived thing, make it seem like he cheated death again or some such rubbish. But it's not in Harry's. As soon as he's back on British soil, he's legally under your so-called protection, he has no recourse if you decide that it really _is _safest for him to stay with those fucking muggles, _despite _the fact that he's recieved official correspondence from the Ministry there, which means his residency information is on file _somewhere_, and therefore vulnerable. All the consultations in the world will be for nothing if you refuse to allow the Aurors to implement whatever plan they come up with. And we have no reason to trust you won't do exactly that, given your historical lack of concern for the safety of children in general, and for Harry's upbringing in particular. No. I'll tell you what I told Hermione: I'm taking my baby cousin on holiday, and everyone else can go fuck themselves. Including you, Your Excellency."

Sirius found himself laughing rather nervously. Dumbledore _clearly _had no idea what to say to that invitation. After a moment, however, he decided on an avenue of attack. "Regardless of your _opinion_ on the matter of Harry's safety, _Miss_ Black — a subject which is _not_ your concern, but that of wizards much older and wiser than yourself — the law _is _on my side. Even if Harry is currently beyond the boundaries of my custody — though that _is _a matter which I think you will find is open to debate — the fact that you removed him from Britain without my knowledge or permission in the first place is itself a very serious crime, in addition to the property damages caused enacting your plan. I think that, upon a brief consideration, you will find that your interests are _also_ served by returning him to me immediately, whereupon I will have _far_ less incentive to prosecute these crimes. And as you insist upon being recognised as the Acting Head of your House, Miss Black, you must realise that all responsibility for Harry's abduction will fall on _you_, unless you give up those who are _truly_ responsible."

Bellatrix grinned. "Go fuck yourself, Your Excellency."

Dumbledore's eyes narrowed, as though he couldn't believe he'd heard her correctly. Sirius, his eyes flicking from the furious old man to the tiny, unrepentant sociopath and back, felt the nearly overwhelming urge to pop into Padfoot's form and go hide under a desk somewhere. "Uh, Bella...maybe we should just—"

"No, Siri. I'm calling his bluff. If he wants to see what will happen if he blows this up into a huge fucking trial, I'm game. I'll get an order to compel Harry's muggles to testify as to the quality of his homelife. It wasn't exactly growing up in the House of Black, but still not the sort of thing normal people would condone. I'll call witnesses to describe the _egregious_ lack of concern for student safety at Hogwarts — he's lucky no one died with a fucking basilisk on the loose for what, eight months? I'll put Harry himself in the fucking chair and question him about the House of Potter and his knowledge of Magical Britain beyond Hogwarts. Which is nothing, by the way.

"Even the most fanatical of the Old Goat's followers among the noble houses _will_ consider exiling one of their own, the last of his House, to be raised in complete _ignorance_ on the word of a jumped-up _commoner _who hasn't the slightest idea the import of his actions for the future of said noble house, to be a crime in and of itself. I believe I already mentioned that Harry _will _choose us over those fucking muggles. He might not want them dead, but he certainly doesn't want to live with them, either, and I _will _make sure that he's well aware whose idea it was to turn the first holiday he's ever taken into a matter of national-level, policy-setting scandal. Not to mention, Dumbledore's credibility is already _shot_, what with announcing Harry's death and then almost immediately _retracting _said announcement — doesn't matter whether Harry's alive or not, either way he was wrong, and very publicly so — how do you think it will look that he took _so _little care of the Boy Who Lived that he either _died_ or managed to fall into a situation where he _could_ have died? Well, _again_, I mean, he _was_ bitten by the basilisk, playing the hero because no one else was apparently up to the task. And his so-called guardian doesn't even know which one it is.

"Of course, it will look even _worse_ if, oh, I don't know, it's discovered at some point in the course of the investigation that the House of Black _did_ inform the Chief Warlock of our plans to take Harry out of the country for the summer, given that he _is_ the boy's official guardian. Pity he's too overworked to get through his bloody inbox in a timely manner, but hey, we _did_ inform him that if he did not address our petition, we would assume he had no issue with it and proceed accordingly." She gave Sirius a grin which reminded him altogether too much of the older Bellatrix about to strike a killing blow before turning to the now white-faced Headmaster with a _very _challenging glare. "I believe I also mentioned that Meda is _very _good at what she does. So. If you want to bring this to the Wizengamot floor, Your Excellency, go _right _ahead. Honestly, I can't think of a better way to announce that the House of Black is _back_ than ousting the Chief Warlock in an Icarian trial."

Right, maybe Dumbledore had had a point about not escalating things, back in the Seventies. Pity he didn't seem to realise he was picking a fight with the same person now. And even more unfortunately, she was right. Regardless of whether she'd meant for this to happen, unless he was _very _lucky, Dumbledore's political career was over.

(And from what Andromeda had told him about Narcissa and the Allied Dark, Dumbledore wasn't going to be that lucky. Sirius would _like _to say he couldn't believe that bitch still held any power after Mouldyshorts' fall, but she'd managed to come out of the whole thing with even _more _influence than she had _before_ her husband was outed as a Death Eater, and he wasn't even a little surprised.)

Sirius could count on one hand the number of times he'd seen Dumbledore look quite _this_ angry — it wasn't often that anyone refused to defer to his authority, and he was openly threatened even more rarely. Light power rolled off him in agitated waves, causing Bellatrix to scowl at him and...Sirius wasn't really sure what she was doing, some sort of freeform spell, maybe? The ambient magic between them twisted, not tainted dark to push back against the light magic, just...somehow forcing it to part around her, like a rock in a stream. It was _surprisingly _subtle for her — Sirius didn't think Dumbledore had actually noticed.

After a moment he recovered sufficiently to...quote the Hogwarts motto at her? "_Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus_, Miss Black."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "Well, if we're just throwing around vaguely threatening bits of Latin, I always liked '_Et consumimus aliquem ut nos devincant_.'"

_And we will consume any who might subdue us?._..That was _not _a motto of the House of Black. Sirius thought it might actually be a line from a poem, though he couldn't place it.

Dumbledore ignored her quotation in favor of elaborating on his threat, as though Bella couldn't possibly have understood it to have responded as she did. (Sirius was certain she had, she just _didn't care_.) "You may currently represent your House, Miss Black, but you are also a student of Hogwarts. It would be _extremely_..._ill-advised_ for you to continue to defy me in this matter."

"You can expel me if you want, but I'm not dragging Harry back to Britain for you, and if you recall from our conversation back in November, you _do _have reasons to keep me around. And it _should _go without saying that if you press charges over that little indiscretion, the trial will almost certainly reveal all the _other _'little problems' you've kept in-house over the past few years, which will in turn almost certainly result in your being removed as Headmaster. So I'm going to stick with _go fuck yourself_."

Sirius interrupted before Dumbledore could respond to that argument, projecting as much calm as he could in an effort to defuse the situation. "You're not going to win this one, Albus." The Chief Warlock's furious glare shifted to him. Sirius quashed the urge to tuck his tail between his legs and shut the hell up, keeping his voice even and his face carefully blank. "You have no political leverage that Bella can't counter, she doesn't recognise your moral authority, and doing whatever the fuck we please with no consideration of opposing social interests is practically a family tradition. And to be perfectly honest, I actually _do_ support her on this one." Dumbledore opened his mouth to say something, but Sirius talked over him. "You fucked up announcing Harry's death. Even if we brought him back today, it wouldn't save your political career, and it's not like the penalty for taking him away in the first place is going to get _worse_ if we wait to bring him back after our vacation." ("Excellent point, Siri!") "And if Bella really did inform you ahead of time, you have no grounds for a legal complaint. So you might as well just go, you're never going to convince us to give him up."

Little Bella beamed at him.

Dumbledore just _stared_, as though he didn't recognise the man sitting before him. All the anger seemed to go out of him in a rush, leaving only defeat. "You truly are not the man I once thought you were, Sirius," he said, sounding, if possible, even more disappointed than he had earlier. "The man I thought you could become."

Yeah, well, the man he'd thought Sirius could become had had _direction_, a purpose in life. He hadn't lost everything — every_one_ — who mattered. Hadn't spent twelve years in the company of dementors, stewing in his guilt, remembering every terrible choice he'd ever made. Hadn't been forced to face the fact that as much as he might have _wanted _to be that man — the man James had always seen in him — he just _wasn't_.

He never had been.

"James is dead, Dumbledore. And if I was ever going to become that man, it wasn't going to be for you. I'll show you out."

* * *

_Dekatria — a thirteen-year span of time, kind of like a decade, but with more magical significance._

_An Icarian trial — a trial wherein the injured party not only fails to win the case they brought to the Wizengamot for mediation, but actually implicates themselves for other crimes, resulting in their own conviction_

_Et consumimus aliquem ut nos devincant — __IRL, this is a re-translation of the Addams family motto (Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc). In universe, it's a line from a poem by Aradia Montreve._

_This scene was supposed to be much shorter and funnier, with Dumbledore telling Siri and Lyra that Bella was dead, and neither of them believing him, going off on a tangent about the Death division in the DOM and what the hell they actually do if not necromancy, just to demonstrate the similarity in their personalities. And then I realised that Dumbledore would have more important things to ask them about, like what the fuck they did with Harry, and who Lyra's mysterious backers are._

_—Leigha_


	7. It's going to be a disaster

Bartemius scowled at the door to his office, upon which his secretary had just rapped — a rather hesitant rapping, but still more than enough to interrupt him, distract him from the report he'd been trying to get through all afternoon. He'd _just_ told the incompetent wastrel that he was _not_ to be disturbed! "What part of _no interruptions_ did you _not_ understand, Penderghast?!"

"Ah, apologies, Director," the young wizard muttered, cracking the door open. "But, um...the Chief Warlock is here to see you."

And of course Dumbledore's orders superceded Crouch's own. Nor could he reasonably turn him away himself, even if it _did_ mean he was probably never going to get through the briefing his office had managed to assemble on the current political situation between the British and Irish muggles. (This was going to be a disaster, Bartemius just _knew _it.)

Dumbledore, when he entered, looked to be in nearly as poor a mood as Bartemius himself, fixing him with an ice-blue glare over the rim of his spectacles and casting privacy charms as soon as he entered the room. The door closed behind him with a slightly louder clap than necessary, and where he would normally have conjured an overstuffed armchair for himself, today he seemed to be too agitated to sit, instead pacing behind the visitors' chairs.

"What can I help you with, Your Excellency?" Bartemius asked, trying to keep his own irritation from his expression, though he hardly stood a chance of keeping it out of his tone.

The Chief Warlock drew a small scroll from his sleeve and threw it on the desk between them. It bounced once, unrolled slightly. Bartemius, almost by reflex, had begun to reach for it even before he hissed, "_This_."

Half a second later, he had it stripped open — the signature matched the copy of the letter the ICW had forwarded to him so many months ago, and the one Castalia Lovegood had shown him only last week. The text, however... Was that _Old_ French? Aside from the language, it was fundamentally identical to the other two letters. (The one addressed to the I.C.W. had, of course, been written in modern standard French, and Miss Lovegood's was Welsh.)

"Did you want me to translate it for you?" he asked, even as his eyes sought out the addressee. _The...fae-touched child of Magic sometimes known as _Perenelle Flamel_?! _"Wait — Perenelle Flamel is a metamorph? I thought she was _dead_!"

He was _certain _he'd heard her death _announced_, at any rate, along with her husband's, back in...the beginning of April? Not long before...

"_So did I_. Until she appeared in my office yesterday to discuss her accommodations for the duration of the Tournament. Tell me, Barty, did you know about this– this change of plans? Did you approve it?"

Of course he had — or, the monster he had the misfortune to have sired had, cackling with amusement as he forced Bartemius to sign off on the changes under the Imperius. Though he might have agreed even without the Unforgivable coercion. As he'd told everyone who'd asked, then and since, what was he _supposed_ to do when an ICW representative contacted him out of the blue to congratulate him on this most excellent idea to foster a genuine attempt at improving Britain's relations with the rest of Europe by affording them a seat at the judges' table? Of _course_ he had said _yes_!

But the way in which Dumbledore put that question to him... "Are you saying you _didn't _know?"

"_No_. Yesterday was the first I'd heard of it! Why didn't you _tell _me?!"

"She wrote _on behalf of the Wizengamot_! You're the _Chief Warlock_! I assumed you _knew_!"

"I. Did. _Not_. Know." Dumbledore's fury was nearly palpable. Understandable, he'd rather been dragged over the coals the past few weeks. But that was, so far as Bartemius was concerned, all his own fault — he should have known better than to try to legilimise an unwitting student, even if she _was _muggleborn, to say _nothing_ of what _must_ have been going on under his nose if he'd legitimately thought the Potter boy to be dead when he'd announced it to the nation at large.

"The I.C.W. contacted me back in April about their letter, and Castalia Lovegood only last week — I understand she was travelling, and only just received it. What was I supposed to tell them? _No_, we don't want you to be involved in our attempt to foster international cooperation? Of _course_ I authorised it! _No_, we don't want a famous duelist and executioner of bloody _Dark Lords_ to be a judge in our tournament? You _do _realise Lovegood is one of the most well-recognised, most _popular_ British citizens, _anywhere_ in the world? And I'm certainly not going to say _no_ to Flamel, either, who _would_?"

"And the _fourth_ of these...replacement judges?"

"I have no idea, they haven't contacted me yet, and my letters have been unable to find Black. The fourth mystery judge is, however, the least of my concerns at the moment. All potential for mischief aside, those who have announced their participation thus far are...not unreasonable choices, truly. No — I am _far_ more concerned about the fact that she invited the _muggles_!"

"..._Muggles_? Why on Earth— _Which_ muggles?"

"The Queen, apparently. _And _the President of Ireland." In fact, that the judges' panel had been altered without proper discussion and negotiation had rather been overshadowed by the Crown's Magical Liaison showing up at his office later that afternoon, demanding to know what the hell a 'Triwizard Tournament' was.

Dumbledore gave him a very flat, unimpressed look. "I'm sorry Bartemius, my hearing must be going, I thought you said that Lyra Black invited the Queen of England and the President of Ireland to—"

"Don't give me that dragonshite, you heard me _perfectly _clearly." She'd just _written to them directly_, apparently, used some old Black Cloak protocol to get the Queen's letter to her staff while the Irish President's had apparently _been owled to his residence_.

The Chief Warlock stared in aghast silence, his mouth gaping slightly. It would have been comical if it hadn't been a completely reasonable reaction to hearing this news — news Bartemius had, again, thought the _Head of the Wizengamot_ had already known, given that the girl had written _on behalf of the Wizengamot_. Hell, that had been the entire reason he hadn't asked _Dumbledore _who the three other judges were meant to be, in the months since the ICW, the Queen, and the Irish had first contacted him — he'd assumed the man wanted some deniability in the whole process.

There was plenty of precedent for the Noble and Most Ancient Houses to take it upon themselves to fulfil treaty obligations on behalf of the governing body when the Chief Warlock or the Wizengamot as a whole was unwilling or unable to do so. Generally this was due to such obligations being politically difficult to accommodate, and (unofficially) requested of them by the Chief Warlock, which was precisely what Bartemius had thought had happened here. They had an undeniable legal obligation to inform the muggle rulers about the Tournament, but there was _so_ much potential for this to go _incredibly badly_ that it was hardly surprising that Dumbledore might want to take care of it in such a way that he could deny responsibility when it inevitably became a political nightmare.

Bartemius had actually felt rather bad for the young Lyra Black, whom he'd assumed couldn't _possibly _have realised the potential ramifications of inviting the muggles to the Tournament when Dumbledore had, he _presumed_, asked her to do it. But she _was_ only a schoolgirl, he'd thought — that would probably help to mitigate any public condemnation, should Dumbledore be forced to shift the blame for a major international incident to her. And it would _hardly _be a great tragedy if the fallout from whatever incident would inevitably occur prevented Bellatrix Lestrange's daughter from reviving the House of Black. Every bloody one of them was a menace to society.

Case in point: the girl had apparently taken it upon _herself_ to set the stage for said major international incident, whatever it might end up being.

"_And_ the Muggle Liaison Office has been, as you might imagine, _worse_ than useless. I tried to pass it off to Richards, but she shunted the whole problem back to me since I was already involved in the Tournament and all _they _do is come up with fake school brochures and falsify muggle identity papers! Nevermind that diplomatic relations with the muggles are meant to be _the entire point of their office_."

"That is _it_," the old man fumed. "First point on the next agenda is sanctioning the House of Black for claiming authority to speak on behalf of the entire body of the Wizengamot."

Authority that rightly belonged to him, he meant.

"Best not," Bartemius advised him. "While she might not have had the authority to issue the invitation, she _was_ entirely correct to do so." _Might_, because he'd already looked into it, and while Lords weren't _supposed_ to speak on behalf of their peers without a vote to that effect, that was convention, not law — the institution of the Wizengamot dated to a _very_ different time, the internal codes governing members hadn't kept up with changing circumstances. "Drawing attention to the fact that you _didn't_ ask her to extend the invitation would only make people question why a schoolgirl who's been the head of her House for less than a year is more familiar with the Treaty of Nineteen Thirteen than the Chief Warlock."

"I am _entirely _familiar with the Treaty in question, but no one has invited a representative of the Crown to observe an international event in _decades_! The Tournament, being a matter of inter-school competition, rather than a diplomatic effort, is far too trivial a gathering to warrant such an invitation."

Yes, and the Quidditch World Cup was nothing more than a sporting match. Bartemius knew the self-serving arguments quite well. He'd written half of them. "Except it's being _framed_ as an effort to foster international understanding and cooperation. _And_ the I.C.W. is involved, now. In which case one might ask why the Chief Warlock was attempting to exclude the muggles from participation, or even observing the proceedings."

The reason, of course, was that what the muggles didn't know wouldn't hurt them. Who would _tell _them if Magical Britain wasn't quite living up to its treaty obligations? And inviting them would only make things more complicated than necessary, especially given the current tenuousness of the ceasefire agreement between the Ministry and Bellatrix Lestrange neé Black — who was, Bartemius suspected, not nearly so dead as the DLE had claimed. Not, of course, that the Truce was anything _official_, but given that 'former' Death Eaters occupied positions of power throughout the government, if the _understanding_ between the two factions unravelled it would tear the nation apart.

Not to mention, as he had gathered from what little he had managed to read of that report (_between constant interruptions_), Muggle Britain and Ireland were dangerously close to some sort of (civil?) war themselves. They were legally obligated to invite both, but bringing their delegations to the same event seemed..._unwise._

Bartemius wasn't certain he'd ever seen Albus Dumbledore look _quite_ this frustrated before, and he'd been present at the trial where Narcissa Malfoy had actually managed to successfully present an _Imperius Defense_ on behalf of her husband. (He still had _no _idea how she'd managed it, because Junior had told him, not long after Katherine's death, that Malfoy had recruited him while they were still in school — he _certainly _hadn't been coerced into joining the Dark Lord in his late twenties.)

"I suppose there is nothing to be done about it now," he ground out after a moment, very reluctantly. "We shall simply have to cope."

"It's going to be a disaster," Bartemius informed him. Not that he thought for a moment that Dumbledore didn't already know that, he simply felt the need to say _something_, and there really was nothing to be said. And even less to be done to correct the situation because, well, _technically _Black's invitation _had_ corrected the situation. Rescinding it would cause even more political problems than allowing the muggles to attend, _and_ go against the law.

The Chief Warlock nodded grimly. "I must admit, I should be hard pressed to think of a single way in which the situation might be made _more_ complex, but—"

He was interrupted by a frantic knock on the door, which Penderghast threw open half a second later, holding a sheet of paper at arm's length, as though it might burst into flame at any moment.

"What is the meaning of this?" Bartemius snapped, over the boy's incoherent stuttering.

"It— This— It was in the post — the _muggle _post! I— You should— I thought you'd want to see it, sir. Both of you." He halted at the edge of the desk, the page wavering between the two of them, as though he wasn't quite certain which of them he ought to give it to.

Dumbledore snatched it from his hand before Bartemius could order him to give it over. With a single final, fearful glance at the thing, Penderghast fled. Dumbledore, meanwhile, appeared to be transfixed.

"Well?" Bartemius demanded. "What is it?"

"...but I dare say that– that insane, _loathsome_ little girl will find a way to manage it," he said, sounding strangely distant, as though in shock, perhaps. After another second he managed to tear his eyes from the letter, meeting Bartemius's with an expression of horror. "I believe this is precisely the sort of situation in which we should be described in common parlance as _completely fucked_."

"What is it?" Bartemius repeated.

Dumbledore let the letter fall to the desk in front of him. "I believe you will find, Bartemius, that the fourth mystery judge is, in fact, _not_ the least of your problems."

Bartemius, who had _just_ managed to make it through the letterhead (_Miskatonic University — College of Art and Design, Office of the Dean_), nodded dumbly, the most relevant sentence drawing his eye as though written in red, despite, in fact, having been plainly typed on simple muggle stationary, the text no different from any other word there.

_The University is pleased to accept Lady Black's invitation on behalf of the British Wizengamot to send a representative to serve as a judge in the revival of the Triwizard Tournament, to be held this year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry..._

They were, indeed, _completely fucked._

* * *

_Crouch's assistant Penderghast is not the same Penderghast who keeps annoying Dora, but they're certainly closely related._

_Yes, Lyra did write every one of her invitations in a different language, because she was manic and if she's going to do that whole proper treaty obligation thing, might as well be polite about it, extend the invitation in the recipient's native language:_

_Irish - Gaelic_

_Crown - English_

_ICW - French_

_Miskatonic - English with American spellings_

_Lovegood - Welsh_

_Flamel - Old French_

_It can be reasonably assumed that the vast majority of every-day citizens don't realise that it's a treaty requirement for the magical community to invite muggle authorities to send a representative to witness diplomatic events like the Tournament which are held on the land they share, and the Ministry obviously has quite a lot of influence with the mainstream media in Magical Britain. Which means that yes, if shit hits the fan, it's perfectly possible that Dumbledore could convince the public that Lyra was out of line in inviting them, and the Wizengamot that he wouldn't have invited them himself. (Or at least, he could have done before the Harry Potter is (Not?) Dead scandal.) The Wizengamot, like Crouch, would likely suspect that he asked her to do it. They'd just be all too happy to pin the blame on her because the House of Black is a menace, and the Noble Houses know this better than anyone._

_Barty Crouch's wife doesn't have a name in canon, so now she's Katherine._


	8. Well at Least That's Something

_What, two chapters in one night? Spoiling you people, honestly. —Lysandra_

* * *

Cassie had been waiting here for what had to be an hour before the door out of the Chief Warlock's office, squirreled away in the centre of the subterranean corridors under the Wizengamot Hall, finally clicked open. "_Finally!_ Wasn't the meeting supposed to end at three?"

Albus Dumbledore — looking noticeably older and frailer than last she'd seen him from this close, shoulders stooped and face a knot of wrinkles, but still holding onto his delightful sense of fashion, robes clashing blues and oranges — paused in the doorway, blinking at her for a brief, surprised moment. "Miss Lovegood? What are you doing here?"

"I wanted to talk to you about something. I tried to set an appointment, but McGee said you were scheduled out the rest of the summer, had to find a moment somehow." It was _very_ possible the snitty, proud woman had been being difficult on purpose — they never had gotten along. Might have something to do with that time Cassie had refused to apologise for hexing her favourite "pranksters" (_i.e._ bullies). And that other time. And that other time. And so on.

(The boys themselves hadn't even minded, thought it was all in good fun. McGee just took _everything_ personally. Part of why it was so fun to mess with her.)

"How did you get through the wards?"

Cassie tried not to scoff — the wards here really weren't _that_ impressive. The anti-scrying shite was excellent, but most everything else? She'd dealt with _much_ better. Besides, "It's almost impossible to ward against phoenix fire."

Albus frowned. "Did Fawkes let you in?" His eyes flicked around the barren, plain office, fruitlessly searching for a person who wasn't here.

"A live phoenix isn't the only source of phoenix fire." Granted, one needed to have experience in song-based casting, be able to shape spells wandlessly, _and_ have a particularly strong alignment to the Light, so the talent was _extremely_ rare — she'd picked it up from an Egyptian sorceress only a few years ago, following a rumour. As specialised as the Chief Warlock was in European wizardry she wouldn't be shocked if he'd never heard of a human using it before. "Come now, Mister Dumbledore, I'm not here to threaten you. In fact, I mean to solve one of your problems for you."

Closing the door behind him, Dumbledore stepped into the room, the entire way to the chair across his desk giving her a heavy, disapproving sort of look. Once he'd sat, settling with a thin sigh, he said, "As much as my political opponents have been giving me troubles of late, I'm certain I couldn't welcome your...trademark method of solving problems."

Cassie smiled. "That's not why I'm here." Dumbledore's 'opponents' weren't nearly so irredeemable as he tended to portray. Honestly, of the political Dark in Britain only a tiny minority had actually been involved with the atrocities of the Death Eaters, or even smaller evils, most of the rest were perfectly reasonable.

In fact, if she had to pick a member of the Wizengamot off the top of her head she most agreed with ideologically, it'd probably be Eirlys Ingham, firmly a member of the Traditionalist "Dark". (The Most Ancient Houses of Ingham, Monroe, and Black were generally considered the cultural core of the British "Dark", so, there's that.) The ultimate source of much of the disagreement between Dumbledore and herself was in how exactly they defined things like "Dark" and "Light" — mostly in that his definition was wrong. The so-called "Dark" in Britain used the term wrong, too. Most of them, anyway, there were a few families, like the Blacks or the Glanwvyls, who were closer, but still. So, ironically, the so-called "Light" was completely unwelcoming to the _true_ Light, some going so far as to deny the very existence of people like Cassie. Shite, even the "Dark" was more open to the Light than the "Light" was — she was ninety-five per cent certain Fionn Ingham was a _bloody white mage_. Honestly...

The point was, no, she was _certainly_ not in Britain to kill "Dark" wizards for him. Silly man.

"I came back to Britain in the first place because I was invited to be one of the judges for the Triwizard, you know."

Dumbledore let out a long, exhausted-sounding sigh. "Yes, so I've heard. The plans for the event were abruptly changed at some point in the last six months, I still haven't gotten a decent explanation of how that happened."

The new Black heiress thought it was funny — that had been fairly clear from her letter, and Cassie didn't see how more of an explanation than that was called for. International Cooperation going along with it was a little more complicated to figure out, but the logic followed easily enough. "Well, the judging stuff is only going to involve a few days of actual..._doing_ anything, but I'm going to be in the country for the whole year. I figured I could teach Defence, as long as I'll be at Hogwarts anyway." Maybe get a duelling club going again too, supposedly Dumbledore had made Filius end it...

Unfortunately, Dumbledore didn't look like he was about to agree immediately, wrinkly face collapsing into a doubtful frown. Well, _that_ was rude, and here she was solving the annual The Defence Professorship Is Cursed problem for him. "You can't honestly believe I'd be willing to give you the position."

"Er...why not? It's only getting harder every year to find someone willing to risk it who _isn't_ completely useless, and here I am offering myself up for the slaughter. Hell, I doubt you have any better qualified candidates lining up." Although, technically, she _wasn't_ qualified to teach Defence in Britain, since she'd only gotten an A on the NEWT. She knew the material of course, but she'd failed the practical — she'd refused to cast the required dark spells, the proctor hadn't accepted her light alternatives, they'd gotten into a nasty argument, it was this whole thing. But Hogwarts had long ago gotten an exception for Defence, due to their peculiar circumstances, so Hogwarts was the _only_ educational institution in Britain she met the absolute minimum requirements for, ironically.

(Or did the Department of Education recognise foreign certificates now? She couldn't remember...)

"It's not your qualifications that are in doubt. Your temperament, on the other hand, _that_ I have doubts about, I'm afraid."

Cassie forced out a harsh scoff, laying a hand over her heart. "You _wrong_ me, Mister Dumbledore. I'm a sweet girl, really, you just have to get to know me."

Seemingly despite himself, a smile twitched at Dumbledore's lips, just for a second. Not surprising, he had his own reputation for irony and dramatics. "I'm sure any number of associates of yours might think so, Miss Lovegood." (Of course, he was also a bit of a chauvinist, so the joke landed for that reason too.) "But the fact remains, I am not certain yours are the hands I wish to leave the children of my school in."

"Okay, now I'm _really_ offended. How many paedophiles have ended up teaching Defence during your tenure as Headmaster? But it's _my_ hands you're worried about. Uh-_huh_."

Every trace of amusement vanished, his face sinking into a glare. "The unsuitability of previous applicants has no bearing on your own."

"It does, I would think, but not really the point." Cassie let out a short sigh. "Be reasonable, Mister Dumbledore. If, for whatever inscrutable reason, you're concerned with me having any contact with the kids at all, it's already too late to prevent that — I _am_ going to be around for the Tournament anyway, you know. And, honestly, if I am given the position, what are you so afraid I'm going to do with it?"

"It is not a threat embodied in your person so much as the culture at large. Our attitudes and our history can be corruptive enough without helping it along. I do try to keep dark wizards and witches out of the Defence position as often as I possibly can."

Cassie actually laughed — that was one of the _stupidest_ things she'd ever heard. "And you think _I'm_ a dark witch? Dumbledore, I have the highest ranking ever achieved by any competitor using solely light magic in the _history_ of the I.D.C. I'm even _known_ for it, ask Filius if you don't follow duelling, he can tell you all about it.

"Honestly, do you have any idea how absurd what you just said sounds? I've never cast a _single_ dark spell _in my life_. _Ever_. If you know a witch _further_ from the Dark than me, I'd like to meet her, 'cause I kinda doubt such a thing exists." Well, white mages, of course, but Dumbledore didn't think _they_ existed at all, so he was hardly likely to use one as an example.

All the dignified annoyance on Dumbledore's face vanished in an instant, a peculiar sort of curiosity taking its place. "_Never_? I wouldn't think that even possible, given your...more famous exploits."

"Yes, well, with the culture of magic here being what it is, light battlemagic is a dying art. Outside of a few isolated traditional communities, the more useful sorts of true witchcraft — nature magic, low ritual, high elementalism, that sort of thing — those have been all but extinguished. I had to look pretty damn hard to get good enough at all that to actually use it in a fight. Believe me, it's _very_ possible for me to do what I do without touching dark magic. In fact, in some ways it's an advantage — people like me are rare enough few dark wizards are properly prepared to defend themselves. It's all out there to find, for people willing to look for it, but, after all, most dark wizards learn their dark magic competing with other dark wizards. Truly dangerous offensive light magic often sets them aback enough they're dead before they can figure out what to do."

Dumbledore seemed rather uncomfortable with the thought of just killing people before they had a chance to respond — which, despite that being the bloody _obvious_ thing to do if you were actually trying to _win_, was entirely expected, given how he'd handled Voldemort's people. Waiting to respond with lethal force _far_ longer than anybody reasonably should was practically a trademark sign of Dumbledore's influence by this point. But, despite that, Cassie saw a sort of reluctant curiosity come into his eyes, he hesitated a long moment before speaking. "I hope I can assume you would be wise enough to not put these most dangerous magics in the hands of your students."

"No, of course not." Maybe if she found a few especially promising upperclassmen, she might give a few...pointers, but not in general, no. "There's just as much variety in light battlemagic as there is in dark. For most of them, they'd just be getting a grounding in the fundamentals in the channelling of light and elemental powers, and some alternatives for the standard— Here, I started drawing up ideas." Reaching into a pocket, Cassie pulled out a matchbook-sized box, unshrinking it into shoebox-sized with a quick freeform dispel. After a bit of flipping around, she found the folder she was looking for.

"Did you already start writing up a curriculum?"

Cassie couldn't help a confused frown at the surprise on his voice. "Er...yeah? I mean, I couldn't very well ask to take the job if I wasn't sure I could do it, could I? Anyway, let's look at..." She paged through the folder for a second. "...third year, let's look at third year. The first month is mostly focusing exercises and such. All seven years start with some of that, actually — can't well have people starting in with elemental magic without determining if they have any relevant affinity, and the light exercises will make the later spellwork far easier to pull off. Might even be able to pull some of the dark-aligned kids doing that a bit to the light, but the most severe will probably have to focus on elemental magic, I've been planning two separate paths for those cases.

"But anyway, in third year I'd then get into very basic self-defence stuff — you know, shielding, disarming, stunning, that sort of thing. Since light spells derive no small portion of their power and direction from the emotional component, they should be more successful with these than kids their age would normally be with arithmantic spells. Not to mention, even weak polarised charms tend to slip right through standard shields, and light shields are _far_ better at blocking dark curses than the ones people are normally taught, so even by the end of November they should have a leg up should they be unfortunate enough to need to defend themselves at any point.

"From there— Well, I'll be playing it by ear a little bit, but I was thinking it might be good to get into some basic healing, and there are some simple divinations which—"

"Stop." A rueful sort of smile pulling at his lips, Dumbledore shook his head, slow and heavy. "You needn't go on any further, Miss Lovegood, you've made your point. I will need to consult with the Board to be certain, but that you actually put thought into your curriculum ahead of time already puts you head and shoulders above most candidates we've considered the last decade."

"So, I've got the job?"

"I fear I may come to regret this, but yes. Provisionally, until the Board signs off."

"Good." Cassie flipped the folder closed. "Can I move into the Castle right away?"

Dumbledore blinked.

"Don't look so surprised, Headmaster. Would _you_ want to stay with my brother any longer than you had to?"

She should _probably_ be offended at how easily he laughed at that, just on principle.


	9. Political Realities

"So, Draco," Narcissa said conversationally, pouring the boy a cup of tea. "How is Miss Parkinson these days?"

Draco eyed her suspiciously. He clearly had no idea why she had demanded that he join her for tea today. She had, on some level, expected that — he did rather take after Lucius, when it came to political acumen. However, she did expect him to be better able to conceal his suspicion and confusion than he was currently managing. It was possible that he _intended_ to be so overt, of course, but she doubted it. And if he _did_, he _shouldn't_. One should never _intentionally _advertise one's genuine ignorance.

Perhaps Lyra had had a point, when she'd accused Narcissa of raising her son to be 'a little bitch' — he _was_ rather more sheltered than either she or Lucius had been at...well, _any _age, and much as she wished she could, she couldn't deny that his magical and social skills were _far_ inferior to the expectations Walburga and Bella had held for her at fourteen. Looking back, she'd already known then that she was going to marry Lucius when she left school and become Lady Malfoy eventually, and had been preparing herself accordingly, learning their family history and positioning herself to become a leader among their peers.

By the time she and Lucius were betrothed, she realised abruptly, she had probably been more prepared to take over as the Head of House Malfoy, if necessary, than Draco was today. Yes, he _had_ just turned fourteen, but she suspected that, without serious effort, that would still be the case in a year's time. Which was, well...unacceptable, honestly, she realised with a twinge of guilt. Walburga would be _so_ disappointed if she knew how poorly Narcissa had prepared her son for adulthood — where _had_ the years gone?

But _that _situation, and the steps needed to correct it, she would have to discuss with Lucius. Today, she had a different topic of discussion in mind — one perhaps even more important, depending on the direction in which the political situation developed over the next year or two.

To put it bluntly, Hawthorne had mentioned (snidely, in passing) that Draco didn't seem to be entirely on board with the direction she intended to take the Allied Dark — which, knowing Draco, probably meant he'd been talking big in front of Pansy again. He hadn't taken Lyra's demonstration of his inferiority at the beginning of the previous school year well at all. Narcissa rather suspected he was trying to convince himself of his own status as well as everyone else, throwing out crass, disparaging comments about mudbloods and line thieves and generally acting like an entitled little twat, as her sister would put it.

This was problematic for several reasons. The Truce had grown dangerously fragile with Bellatrix's escape, for one — no one with half a brain truly believed she was dead — and Lucius _was_ a Death Eater, perhaps the most well-known among those who had escaped Azkaban. His son _could not_ go around advertising his own pureblood supremacist leanings in this political climate. And on a related note, Narcissa _was_ going to drag the Allied Dark into a position to ride out the inevitable democratic expansion of the Wizengamot — kicking and screaming, if necessary — which meant that they _were_ going to become more muggleborn-friendly, whether they liked it or not. Plus, this ridiculous, _juvenile _feud Draco seemed to be intent on perpetuating with Lyra needed to stop, _now_. Sirius hadn't been cleared of all charges and recognised as the Head of House Black yet, true, but it was all but certain that the trial would conclude within the week, which meant the Blacks would very soon have a political voice with which to retaliate against Draco and the House of Malfoy if he persisted in his claims that their heiress was illegitimate. (Which Sirius would do simply to make Narcissa's life difficult, because _their _ridiculous, juvenile feud never _had_ been properly resolved.) Not to mention, if he kept it up, Lyra would almost certainly lose patience with him, and Narcissa was _acutely _aware of the sort of things her sister tended to do when tedious people insisted on forcing their company on her.

That business with the Hogwarts Divination professor apparently losing her mind, for example, had a very _Bellatrix_ flavor to it.

"She's fine, I suppose," Draco answered, too hesitantly, after a long pause.

"Do endeavor to conceal your uncertainty, Draco."

He glared at her which, while still not the cool, distant mask he _ought _to be aiming for, was at least _slightly _better than confusion or suspicion. "Fine, then. Pansy is well, why do you ask?"

"Oh, I just happened to run into her mother the other day. She mentioned the two of you have been discussing politics, of late. Dare I ask what positions you may be developing?"

Draco's face twisted into a sneer, which he attempted to conceal behind his teacup. Unsuccessfully. "If you're asking, Mother, I dare say you already know — I think Lord Nott is right. We should be fighting this ridiculous idea of letting the commoners govern us, not rolling over in an attempt to placate them before just handing them the reins of the Government."

"Cadmus Nott is an idiot," Narcissa informed her son. His eyes widened at her bluntness. "The Dark houses command an ever-shrinking minority—" (A ridiculous oversimplification if ever she had made one, but she suspected Draco understood so little of the situation as to preclude a more accurate characterisation of the political landscape, another failure on her part, and one which she would begin to correct at the earliest opportunity.) "—of the seats in the Wizengamot, and Democratic Expansionism has made drastic gains among the Common Fate and Ars Publica over the past ten years. They _will _get the majority they need to make their reforms regardless of any efforts we might make to thwart them. That is an arithmantic _certainty_. If we wish to weather the storm we must prepare for that inevitability — and I _assure_ you, Draco, I have every intention of doing so."

He gave her a petulant pout. "It's not _weathering the storm_ if we lose everything that makes us different from the common riff-raff."

"And what are those things, precisely?"

Draco hesitated. As Narcissa had suspected, he'd simply been parrotting the rhetoric spouted by Nott's faction, rather than developing the argument for himself. "Erm...our autonomy?" he guessed.

"Common Houses are functionally very similar to Noble Houses under the law, in that regard. If we move now to sway public opinion to our side, secure a majority of the new seats, we will be able to ensure that laws degrading the autonomy of Houses — both Noble _and_ Common — remain un-passed. Try again."

"Our history? Our bloodline?"

"Neither of which is affected by the makeup of the Wizengamot, or indeed any laws that might be enacted by it."

"We— Our ideals, then. Culture, and...stuff."

Narcissa fixed him with a rather unimpressed stare. "_Culture and stuff_?"

"Er...you know, like...not taking on stupid muggle ideas. Like holidays," he added, obviously making an attempt to seize on a point he _knew_ Narcissa believed was important.

"Would these be the same holidays you personally disparage as being disgusting heathen rituals, because you can't stand the sight of your own blood?" she asked innocently, before informing him that, "That argument would hold _far_ more weight if you actually celebrated the Powers." He _did_, of course, still participate in his mother's holiday rituals, but he never had truly understood Magic, and she held absolutely _no_ hope that he would continue to make any observances as her influence over him waned. "Not to mention, muggles today have almost as little respect for Christianity as your father does for the Old Ways. Muggleborns certainly think our religious traditions _odd_, but they are hardly the ones attempting to limit or ban our ritual practices."

"No, but everyone knows Dumbledore supports them, don't they want the same things he wants?"

Narcissa sighed. Clearly they ought to have had a frank discussion about this _years_ ago. "No. Some might agree with _some_ things that he wants, but the vast majority of muggleborns see his principles as being more antiquated than ours in many important ways."

"How would you know that?" Draco asked, glaring at her accusingly, as though it were some sort of heinous crime to have actually researched a demographic which was only set to become more of an influence in their political sphere over the next two decades.

"Shocking as you may find this revelation, Draco, muggles do write history books and publish newspapers. Many of them are even capable of verbal communication, should one wish to question them directly about their opinions on religious freedom or economic policy or any number of other political issues."

In fact, Ars Publica, the traditional pre- Death Eater Dark in the Wizengamot, had been more attractive to muggleborns than Dumbledore's Light for some decades now — their inclination to live and let live was more in line with modern muggle sensibilities. The last war had stalled the drift of muggleborns and halfbloods and commoners toward the Dark temporarily, Ars Publica tarred with the same brush as the Death Eaters in Light propaganda despite publicly opposing them, but that trend had sharply reversed over the last decade. In fact, they'd probably already have a solid majority in a democratic Wizengamot, if only in coalition with the Common Fate.

Her son subsided into a furious, embarrassed silence at her sarcasm, frowning down at his tea as though hoping it would give him some sort of hint as to what he should say next.

"Democratic Expansion will happen whether we fight it or not," she offered, in a much more consoling tone. "If we fight it, we will lose, and in the process make enemies of those who will shortly hold a degree of power equal to or even greater than our own. Thus we must make the most of the time we have left to sway the public to our way of thinking. It is the only possible chance we have of preserving any degree of political influence in the long term, and perhaps even reforming the policies which have so marginalised traditional practices over the past several decades. The Allied Dark _will_ follow my lead in this."

"That's not what Lord Parkinson and Lord Nott say. They say they can still fight the Expansionists, and they'll die before they let you compromise our society by catering to the whims of _animals_ over proper wizards."

Narcissa felt her eyes narrow in annoyance. Honestly?

Cadmus, of course, was an idiot, and had never liked her anyway, it was hardly surprising that _he_ (still) had his doubts. She was well aware that he'd been sneaking around meeting with the Browns and Llewellyns in an effort to establish a new alliance, since she'd made it clear the Allied Dark would _not_ be moving in the direction he favored. She'd been aware of his treacherous leanings even before Lyra had passed along the intelligence young Theo had volunteered.

But she'd thought Menelaus, at least, was smarter than that. He'd certainly been wise enough to pretend he'd been attempting to _recruit_ the members of Ars Brittania who were known to have been attending the little _gatherings_ at his home, rather than attempting to defect. She, of course, had pretended to believe him, while simultaneously reminding him that while she might not be able to betray the fact that he _had_ been a willing Death Eater without resigning Lucius to Azkaban and severely weakening her own credibility, that was far from the _only _potentially damaging information she held over him. She'd had similar little _chats_ with Yaxley, Rowle, and Wilkes (the last of whom she didn't _actually _have any blackmail worthy information on, but he certainly seemed to believe she might, so she was currently working on ferreting out what it might be). They _appeared_ to have been falling in line over the past few weeks, but if they were now trying to _corrupt _her _son_...

"Was this before or after I reduced Cadmus Nott to a smoking pile of bloodied limbs last month? Because their deaths _can_ be arranged." Granted, Menelaus _was_ a more talented fighter than Cadmus, but she was confident she could still take him in an honor duel — he hadn't managed to beat her in a fair fight since she was fifteen, and he _had_ tried.

(Not that Narcissa had ever been inclined to fight fair herself. Assassination was a tried and true method for dealing with enemies of the House of Black, and both Theodore and Tyndareus were more reasonable individuals...)

Draco gaped at her. Understandable, perhaps, she did normally refrain from making such direct comments in front of him — she hardly wanted him thinking that such things were appropriate to speak of in polite company — but it was time he started to realise that their society was far more dangerous and complicated than the impression she might have given him in her attempt to raise him as a young gentleman without subjecting him to the same sort of upbringing as _she_ had had. "You did _what_?"

Oh, or that. "I _can_ hold my own in a fight, you know," she said drily, pouring herself another cup. He _ought_ to know — it wasn't exactly a secret, even if he'd never shown much interest in dueling himself, and had therefore never progressed past the most introductory exercises in their lessons. Her most recent duel with Cadmus was _hardly _the first challenge she'd withstood as the leader of the Allied Dark. Certain Dark Patriarchs seemed to have a persistent _problem_, allowing a witch half their age to dictate their political policy.

(She'd had occasion to wish some of the traditionally matriarchal Dark Houses had joined their alliance, but none had — which _was_ curious, she couldn't think of why that might be.)

"But they were _Death Eaters_!"

Narcissa had to smile slightly at that, because they had been, yes. Bella had liked to set overconfident Death Eaters against her baby sister and the even younger Regulus, just to make a point. It was _hardly _fair — Bella had been training them alongside the new recruits since Narcissa was ten — but the point she was making wasn't that life was _fair_, but that arseholes like Menelaus weren't nearly as good with a wand (or anything else) as they thought they were.

"Indeed. Menelaus was essentially a merchant — a middleman who procured items and ingredients that were particularly difficult to find. Cadmus, if I recall correctly, primarily led raids against muggleborns and their families. They _did_ fight, of course, in the major battles, but they were hardly among the Dark Lord's best."

"I— But..."

In response to her son's wide-eyed shock, she added, "You didn't think _all _of the Death Eaters were elite warriors, did you? Your father was rather highly placed in the recruitment and intelligence arm of the organisation, but your cousin Lyra could probably best him in a duel."

Honestly, very few of the Death Eaters had ever been very elegant fighters. Certainly all those who had survived were good enough to hold their own in a brawl or a battle against the Hit Wizards, but hardly professional dueling material. And in any case, most of them had gone to seed in the years since the war ended.

Draco scowled at the mention of his cousin. Apparently it was no consolation to him that his father would hardly have fared better in that little farce at the beginning of the school year (though Lyra _would _almost certainly have had to use spells other than illusions to defeat Lucius). "I still can't believe she's really a Black."

Narcissa sighed. She knew she ought to have told Draco about Lyra when she first appeared, but she'd thought it best, at first, to polish off the worst of Lyra's rough edges, but it hadn't taken long to realise that the two of them almost certainly wouldn't get on. Introducing them and encouraging them to treat each other as family would, she'd thought, be worse than allowing them to negotiate their own relationship (or lack thereof) when they returned to Hogwarts. The very idea reminded her of moving in with Sirius's parents when they'd been five. She didn't really remember who started it, now, but they had _hated_ each other all through school, even before Sirius had abandoned the House for the Light. She was certain that it had been for the best not to subject her son to a similar situation with Lyra.

She had, however, underestimated his capacity for stubborn denial when faced with unpleasant truths. Such as the fact that Lyra Black _was_, in fact, a Black, and as such his cousin and peer — his _better_, even, given the difference in status between the Blacks and the Malfoys — not some social inferior he could dismiss with sneering condescension. "She is."

"Who're her parents, then? Where did she come from?"

"That is none of your concern. She is a legitimate Black. Moreover, she is the Black _heir_, which puts the two of you on the same social level, now that Sirius's exoneration is all but assured, and the Blacks are once again a political entity. Which, by the by, means I will no longer tolerate your juvenile attempts to begin a feud with her."

"But _Mother_, she humiliated me in front of the _entire school_!"

"Draco, I will tell you this once, and once only: I do not care. That was months ago, and you were as much to blame for that situation as she was. Picking a fight with Lyra is pointless at best," _and suicidal at worst_, "and it ends now. She is your cousin, and you _will _treat her as such."

"I was _not_ — did _she_ tell you that? That I started it? Because I didn't! She's the one who hexed me in the back!"

She was _also_ the one who had saved his life from a bloody hippogriff, which Narcissa thought rather outweighed the subsequent silencing charm. "I do not care who started it — you _will _stop antagonising her, before her patience runs out and I recieve an owl from Professor Snape to the effect that she has put you in hospital. _Again_."

"That's not fair!"

"What, precisely, is unfair about it?"

"Well, I— I don't know, it's just _not_! Why don't you tell _her_ to stop antagonising _me_?"

Because Bella was constitutionally incapable of _not _antagonising _everyone_, really. And also because, so far as she could tell, Lyra had only antagonised Draco by constantly showing him up with no effort whatsoever. "Because _she_ is not my child. You are. And your actions reflect upon myself and your father, and the House of Malfoy at large."

"And hers don't reflect on the House of Black?" he shot back, glaring at her over crossed arms.

Of course they did. Even accounting for the 'fact' that she couldn't possibly have been _raised_ by the Blacks, she _was _the future of their House. But Bella had been (and Lyra was) in many ways, an exemplar of the Black ethos. Not the practices they'd adopted over the past several generations, but the _legend _of the Blacks — both their own histories and those of their contemporaries painted them as mad but brilliant, sadistic and self-destructive, absurdly powerful, and impossibly larger than life. The fire at the heart of the Dark, fascinating and enthralling and entirely unattainable. Much as it might pain the Lords of the Wizengamot to admit it, Lyra was _exactly _what they thought of when they imagined what a Black _should _be like.

"They certainly don't reflect _poorly _on the Blacks. If you're going to pick a fight, my son, make sure it's one you can _win_." Draco apparently had nothing to say to that, staring at her as though she'd just smacked him across the face, perhaps with a fish. Which was absolutely fine, perhaps he'd actually manage to _listen_, now. "In any case we have been discussing a political alliance with the Blacks, bringing them into the new coalition, so she should have no incentive to continue your little feud."

She continued for several minutes, outlining the goals of the coalition and the expectations she held for Draco in the coming year — she could hardly have him going off insulting muggleborns and taking the Death Eater propaganda at face value, repeating Nott's talking points as though they had some merit, when she was _attempting_ to shift the Allied Dark in a more _traditionally _Dark direction, away from the more radical nationalist extremes they had drifted toward over the course of the war and not yet entirely abandoned. She had made _some_ progress, in the two decades since becoming Lady Malfoy, but her fourteen-year-old son running around acting like a would-be Junior Death Eater _did_ rather undermine that progress, suggesting that she privately held ideals which ran counter to her public statements.

Which she _did_, of course, though they were more along the lines that she would be _damned_ if she was going to allow the status quo to fail so entirely that she no longer held the power and influence to which she had become accustomed. She honestly couldn't care less whether that meant supporting the Death Eaters or taking on muggleborn clients. She had already insisted that Lucius diversify their investments to include muggle businesses — those options had been both financially and politically prudent at the end of the war. Portraying herself and her voting bloc as offering a pathway toward harmonious muggleborn integration, rather than maintaining the divisive culture war that both the Light and most of her allies perceived to exist between muggleborns and proper wizards, was hardly an unappealing political model, and more importantly, it was _pragmatic_.

"Do you understand?" she asked her son firmly, as she came to the end of her explanation of why he _must_ reform his public persona, beginning immediately.

It seemed he did not. "Why do you want to ally with _her_? I thought you _hated_ Lord Black!"

Narcissa did her best to suppress her frustration. "Draco. My feelings toward Sirius and yours toward Lyra are completely irrelevant. This is not about the Blacks. It is about political objectives, and the fact that ours and theirs, and those of several other prominent Houses, align in such a way as to make them valuable potential allies. Honestly, you'd think I was telling you that you have to _marry _the girl. You don't even have to _like_ her. But you _will _drop your little quarrel, and you will drop it _now_."

The stubborn child muttered something under his breath which _might_ have been a surrender, but might equally have been a rebellious refusal.

"Enunciate, Draco."

"I _said_, I _can't_ drop it!" he said, shooting her a furious glare. "I— Even if I did, she'd still..."

A chill swept over her as he faltered there, fear creeping into his tone. "She would still _what_, Draco?"

"She would still retaliate, okay? You said she wouldn't have any reason to continue our feud, but that's not how feuds _work_ — we're not— She's still going to...to do _something_, I _know_ it!"

"What. Did. You. _Do_?" Narcissa forced as much disapproving authority into her voice as she could. If Draco was so very concerned that Lyra would refuse to abandon her game with him he must have done _something_, because according to Severus she had _hardly _been going out of her way to toy with him — Narcissa honestly rather doubted that Lyra found Draco even mildly entertaining.

She had _assumed_ that if her son stopped poking at her, the girl would find other people with whom to amuse herself — regardless of how annoying Draco might be, Lyra _did_ acknowledge that he was Narcissa's child, and therefore not an appropriate target to entertain herself with. And even _he_ could hardly fail to notice her lack of interest in his attempts to one-up her or reveal her illegal or socially unacceptable habits. She distinctly recalled several letters, in fact, complaining about this very fact. The one that came to mind — especially memorable because Narcissa would be entirely unsurprised to discover that it was actually true — was when he'd started a rumour that Lyra was snogging wilderfolk out in the Forbidden Forest, and she hadn't even appeared to notice.

If he _had_ managed to catch her attention, however... Well, depending on what he had done — and it had to have been something rather extreme, if he was so certain she would feel the need to retaliate... This could be _bad_.

The boy shrank in on himself, toying with his teacup and refusing to meet her eyes as he muttered, "It's not so much what _I_ did, but...I _might_ have, erm...let her get ambushed by some older students at the end of last year. Or. Er. It's possible she'd think I had something to do with organising the whole thing. I _didn't_," he added hastily, obviously lying. "It was all Lavender's idea!" (_Lavender_? He didn't mean Lavender _Brown_, did he? Dark Powers, if her son had been running around scheming with the _children of Ars Brittania_...) "But, erm...she might still _think _I did. And, you know, want revenge."

If he was willing to admit that much, Narcissa suspected that Lyra almost certainly had good reason to believe that he'd been the organiser of said ambush. "What did you do to her?" she asked, bracing herself against the answer. _It couldn't have been _that _bad_, she thought, attempting to quash her anxiety. She'd seen Lyra several times over the past few weeks, and she hadn't mentioned anything...

"_I_ didn't do anything!"

"If that were true, you would have no reason to fear her vengeance."

"I– I'm not _afraid_, I just—"

"You are. And you are lying to me, and moreover you are doing so poorly. I am not upset with you because of your fear—" The Morrigan knew Narcissa would be afraid if she'd organised some sort of _attack_ on Bella and she'd survived. (And Bella had _liked_ Narcissa.) "—but because you did something so _incredibly stupid_. What did you and your 'older students' do to her?"

"Nothing! It's fine, they obliviated her after, and—"

"Draco! I am trying to help you, here, but I cannot do so if you refuse to cooperate! You do not obliviate someone over _nothing_. What did you do?"

He squirmed in his chair for a long moment, pinned by her glare, before realising that there was no way out of this. He was certainly not a good enough liar to deceive her, and she was hardly going to abandon her line of questioning. Of course, his admission, when he made it, was once again rather less than clearly audible.

"I cannot hear you when you mumble, Draco."

"_I_ didn't do anything, but they– they beat her. Broke her hand, and her leg. And one of them used some kind of torture spell on her to make her think she was drowning. And Rowle conjured some kind of acid, and, um..."

"_Um..._"

"Um... Le Parc snapped her wand."

Fabulous. Just _fucking_ fabulous. And Draco still looked entirely too guilty to have confessed _everything_. "_And?_"

"And...um...oneofthemusedtheCruciatusonher," he said, so quickly that Narcissa wasn't entirely certain of his exact words. She _was_, however, certain that she'd heard _Cruciatus_ in there.

"You let some idiot child use the Cruciatus on your cousin?"

He shuddered. Nodded. "It was _horrible_, Mother, the way she screamed... And then, after..." He trailed off, but the disturbed look on his face communicated clearly enough what must have happened.

"Let me guess: she acted like she'd been hit with a Cheering Charm and said something mocking about the caster's technique?" Narcissa found herself quite unable to keep a note of exasperated resignation off her voice, because of course she would have, she always _had_ been completely _insane_.

Draco's mouth fell open. "_How..._?"

"I _have_ seen Bella put under the Cruciatus before," she snapped, in response to his inarticulate question. Several times, in fact — she'd encouraged her trainees to use it as a shield-breaker when they couldn't get anything else through, and de Mort had had a tendency to throw it around in exhibitions. (And as foreplay, but Narcissa didn't like thinking about Bella's sex life.) "Granted, mocking the caster about their technique _was _a guess, but that she would continue to antagonise them was almost guaranteed." And if the caster was a schoolchild, they'd likely made a hash of it, none of the Unforgivables were particularly _easy _spells to cast.

"Bella?"

"_Yes_, Bella. My sister, Bella."

"Er...what does she have to...?"

Narcissa sighed. Someone, Narcissa wasn't entirely certain _who_, had realised early in the summer that the best explanation for who Lyra was and where she had come from was that she was a bio-alchemy clone of Bellatrix. (It might have been Bellatrix herself, the explanation was leagues more reasonable than any _other_ cover story they'd offered thus far.) Lyra and Mirabella had subsequently decided that, since the House of Black was now on the verge of holding a degree of power again and could therefore offer some protection to Lyra should anyone choose to make an issue of the fact that Bellatrix was her mother, there was no real harm in establishing this as the 'real' story behind all the cover stories they'd spread around last year. Not that Narcissa disagreed. In fact, she was rather of the opinion that they could have used that story from the beginning — it wasn't as though _being someone's daughter_ (or even blood alchemy clone) was illegal, and it _did_ neatly explain how Lyra was so _impossibly _similar to Bella at fourteen. (Though it would likely have caused authority figures to view her with a certain degree of suspicion from the beginning, so she _did_ understand why they had held off 'admitting' it.)

This wasn't precisely how she'd intended to inform Draco of that 'fact', however. She hadn't truly _intended _to inform him at all — there was simply no point. Aside, perhaps, from impressing upon him the importance of avoiding her ire.

"Do you recall some twenty minutes ago, when I told you that Lyra's parentage was none of your concern?"

"Er...yes?"

"Lyra is my sister's daughter. In fact, I suspect that Lyra is a simple bio-alchemic _copy _of Bellatrix. I trust you can see why there may, in fact, be cause for concern, given the _idiotic_ actions to which you've just confessed." The furious pink that had risen in her son's face over the course of this little chat vanished as he realised that the girl he had been attempting to pick a fight with, whose beating and torture he had arranged, was essentially the same person as his mad Aunt Bellatrix, whom no one in their right mind would intentionally antagonise. "If there is any spark of intelligence in that little blond head of yours, you will apologise to Lyra for your part in that little ambush, and _beg_ her not to retaliate. Because while I doubt she has any intention of seriously harming you, I also doubt that she understands exactly how incapable you would be of coping with a proportionate response."

"I'm not _incapable_—" he tried to protest, but Narcissa cut him off almost at once.

"Stop, Draco. Just...stop. You are outmatched, and as I do not want my niece to accidentally _kill_ my son, this game ends _now_."

"It's not a _game_, Mother!"

"What's not a game, Cousin?"

Draco yelped, startling badly enough that he very nearly fell out of his chair. Narcissa could hardly blame him. She had herself only just managed to suppress an _eep_ of surprise at her time-travelling sister's sudden appearance. Where the _hell _had she come from?!

"We were just talking about you," she managed to say, more or less evenly. Not evenly enough that Lyra didn't catch her discomfort, as she gave Narcissa a mocking grin, but certainly enough that Draco didn't notice. "Tea?"

"Oh, no, I'm not staying, I just wanted to pop in for a few minutes to tell you—"

"Where did you come from?!" Draco interrupted. "How did you get in here?!"

Lyra gave him a patently false look of confusion. "Oxford, and I _walked_." Shadow-walked, Narcissa assumed, since she was fairly certain Lyra hadn't figured out how to apparate completely silently. She hadn't appeared in some shadowy corner, either, but that was still the best explanation Narcissa could come up with. "Now, hush, Draco, the grown-ups are talking," she said, giving him a patronising grin and taking an uninvited seat.

"You can't _shush_ me in my own bloody house, Black, I don't care _whose_ daughter you are—"

"Oh, you told him about that?"

"I did, yes. Just now, in fact."

Lyra shrugged. "Right, well, in that case, Mummy Dearest says _hi_. But that's not why I'm here."

Narcissa sighed. "Lyra, you really shouldn't go around implying you've been in contact with Bellatrix. I _know_ you know that." Not that she actually doubted Lyra _had_ been in contact with Bellatrix. Popping off to Italy (or wherever she was hiding out at the moment) to spend a few days with her alternate self was _exactly _the sort of thing she'd expect Lyra to do — or Bella, if their positions were reversed. Time travel always _had_ been an interest of hers.

"Oh, are you going to turn me in? I'm hurt, here I thought we were _family_. Speaking of which, Siri also says _hi_, but I think he was being sarcastic. And Emma will be available to discuss the alliance any afternoon next week, just owl me—"

"I might," Draco interrupted again, glaring furiously at his cousin.

"Might what?"

"Turn you in."

"Do you really think anyone would believe you? Bella's slightly _dead _at the moment, you know," Lyra said, her tone _impressively _serious. (For Lyra.)

Narcissa couldn't help snorting slightly at that (and her son's flummoxed expression), trying to suppress a laugh. "Draco, what did we just discuss?" When he failed to respond, she further prompted him, "You were going to apologise to your cousin, were you not?"

Before he could either do so or refuse, Lyra cocked her head to one side. "Why? He hasn't done anything lately. I haven't even seen him in _weeks_."

"And the last time you saw him?"

"Um..." Apparently she had to think about this. Because of course she did — why _would_ it be significant that she'd been ambushed and tortured only a few weeks ago? _Bellatrix, honestly._ "Draco, did you actually tell your mum that you managed to get the drop on me?" She must have guessed from the way he froze that he had, because she smirked at him before turning back to Narcissa. "It's fine, Cissy. Dark Powers, do you really think I'd be petty enough to demand an apology just because he got the better of me for once? You've clearly been spending too much time around Malfoys. I mean, I don't _like_ losing, and it's not going to happen again, but it would be _really _fucking hypocritical of me to get all twisted up over it. Besides, if I was going to complain about anything, it'd be Pomfrey keeping me in hospital for a whole bloody _week_, not Draco recruiting some allies and making a half-decent play for once. Oh! And also, I was obliviated. So I don't _know_ that your precious baby was behind the whole kidnapping-and-torturing thing, anyway."

"Oh, cut the crap, Lyra. Are you seriously telling me you have no intention of retaliating against your attackers?"

The girl gave her a rather startled, confused look. "What? No... Who said _that_? I'm definitely going to do _something_ to them. But Draco really doesn't need to apologise for setting me up, and he was _barely_ involved — unless _you _think that he's capable of casting the Cruciatus or an obliviation, or even that nifty little waterboarding curse, or transfiguring nitric acid. Granted, he _could_ be responsible for breaking every bone in my wand hand, but given how green he's looking at the moment, I kind of doubt it." She shrugged. _Shrugged_. "So, if that's settled, I just wanted to let you know that the Grangers did agree to our Vassalage offer, and Emma will be taking over as our Proxy as soon as Sirius gets bored of the Wizengamot, probably by mid-September. I'm arranging introductions for her over the next few weeks, so—"

"No, Lyra, _that_ is _not_ settled. As I _just_ told Draco, I will not have my niece getting carried away with some twisted little game and murdering my son, so. What do you want?"

"Er...what?"

"What do I need to do to ensure that you will leave my son out of whatever undoubtedly ridiculous, convoluted revenge plan you happen to be formulating against Draco and his allies?"

Lyra hesitated for a long moment, her brow furrowed in intense contemplation. "Is this one of those questions where I'm supposed to lie?"

_What kind of..._ Honestly, Narcissa did wonder sometimes if Bella had been this...obtuse, at Lyra's age. If she had been, it went a _long_ way toward explaining her..._friendship_ with Mirabella. "_No_, why would you...?"

"Oh. Well, then, nothing. And I hear sometimes it's a good idea to placate your political allies with polite untruths."

That...sounded like something Walburga would have said, actually. But _ignoring_ that... "_Nothing_?" Narcissa repeated, more disbelieving than anything.

"I'm not going to kill him, he's on Bella's list—" But _not_ Lyra's, Narcissa noted, glaring at the girl. "—but you—"

"What _list_?" Draco interrupted, rather too urgently to be unconcerned. "What list am I on?"

The girl smirked. "The list of people Bella doesn't want to kill, and by extension doesn't want _me_ to kill. Keep up, Drakey-poo," she explained dismissively before returning to her previous thread. "Anyway, I might not be allowed to kill him, but you can't just keep going around fighting his battles for him and bailing him out when he gets in trouble _forever_, so _no_, there's nothing you can do or give me to prevent my teaching him a lesson about leaving dangerous enemies alive behind you. It might even save his life one day, if he keeps going around starting shite like a Black." She turned back to Draco, grinned. "If you're planning to piss off dangerous people, you really _do_ need to be a bit more ruthless when you have them at your mercy. Your mother should have taught you that, but sadly she seems to love you too much to raise you properly, so you'll have to make do with me."

Draco, red-faced and furious, sputtered incoherently for a moment before managing a painfully entitled, "_Mother!_"

Narcissa herself was hardly less furious. "Draco is _my _son, Lyra. He is _not_ a Black, and it is _not_ your responsibility to teach him _anything_. Nevermind the fact that you are only a child yourself, and—" A wave of cold magic washed over her, cutting off her voice with practiced ease as Lyra slipped her wand back into its holster — that little _bitch_!

"Call me a child again, Cissy," she said coolly, even as Narcissa cracked the familiar silencing charm. "You wouldn't be _nearly _so defensive about it if you didn't know I was right."

"You _smug_ little— You are absolutely _infuriating_! Even when I _know_ you're just trying to get a rise out of me."

"It's a gift. And I'm not _just_ trying to get a rise out of you, I really do think that you did Draco a disservice giving him a _childhood_. Bella and Walburga would agree with me. Brax, too, for that matter." (Narcissa winced, just slightly. She couldn't help it. Abraxas would be even more upset than Walburga — it was the future of _his_ House on the line, after all.) "And if I had more time, I might make an argument to the effect that he's a Black as much as you are, and that means he _is_ my responsibility, but quite frankly I don't like him that much, and I already have my hands full with Harry. Also, I _really _don't care. And I have to go if I don't want to be late to breakfast, so."

Draco threw a biscuit at her, seething and mouthing what Narcissa suspected were _filthy_ insults, completely silently. She must have jinxed him at the same time she had her.

"Thanks!" she said brightly, plucking the thing off the table in front of her and taking a bite.

Narcissa cast a dispel at her son, who continued to rail silently at his cousin. "What the hell is this, Lyra?"

"It's new, like it? It'll wear off...eventually...probably." She shrugged, smirked. "I don't know, really, I didn't really care to sit around and wait to find out. The counter's not really that difficult, just specific. And ironic, because Bella thinks she's funny. Anyway, owl me about the meeting, that's all I stopped by to say. And also to tell you to tell Draco that the Grangers are my vassals, now, so if he hexes Maïa again, I'll definitely do something worse than siccing Tyche on him for a few days, though I suppose since he's _here_... Fair warning, Cousin."

It took a moment for Narcissa to parse that threat, simply because it was so _incredibly_ absurd. "You set the _Lady_ on my _son_?!"

"Is this going to be like the fake dementor conversation? Though I stand by dementors not really being _that_ bad. Draco's already pretty boring, so."

"Lyra. You cannot simply go around using Black Arts on _schoolchildren_!"

She had the temerity to _laugh_ at that. "Did I, though? I doubt anyone could prove it. He could've just had a few days of entirely mundane bad luck. And even if he didn't, I don't think asking a friend for a favor really counts as Black Arts if you don't actually do a ritual to get their attention. And—" She checked the time. "—I'm now officially late for breakfast. I should get back to California before the boys take all the muffins. _Ciao_, Cissy. Draco." And then she disappeared, vanishing into thin air as abruptly and mysteriously as she'd arrived, which was just...

Absurd. Just completely, impossibly, _insanely _absurd. (In an undeniably _House of Black_ sort of way, but that _hardly _made it — _her_ — any less infuriating or disturbing.)

Narcissa flicked a _quietus_ at her son — there was only one silencing charm which Bella might consider _ironic_, its counter being arithmantically indistinguishable from a Sound-Softening Charm — and fixed him with the most intensely _serious _expression she could muster. "You _will_ adjust your behavior this coming year, and you _will _accept whatever humiliating punishment Lyra comes up with for your part in instigating that _insane_ plan, and then, if you have _any _sense of self-preservation _whatsoever_, you will do your utmost to avoid annoying your cousin ever again. Understood?"

The boy nodded, staring at the chair from which Lyra had vanished with a vaguely horrified expression, still silent despite her having lifted the jinx. She wondered whether it was the casual confirmation that Lyra was in contact with Bellatrix that had so suddenly unnerved him, or the _very _thinly veiled admission that she was willing to use _Black Arts_ to protect the Granger girl. Or possibly, she supposed, the thought that she would do _worse_ than cursing him with the attentions of the Lady Herself if he dared hex the muggleborn again.

Personally, Narcissa found the implication that Lyra had just _casually asked the Lady for a favor_ most terrifying, but she didn't think Draco was sufficiently familiar with High Ritual to understand how truly _alarming _the idea of someone just...walking around talking to the Powers actually was. _Normal_ ritualists were bad enough, but just constantly holding the attention of Magic Itself? Not to mention, _who_ the _fuck_ held enough sway to _ask a favor_ without some sort of negotiation of the cost? Rituals weren't _just_ about catching the eye of a particular Power or Aspect. She had _never_ heard of an Aspect granting a boon without _some_ kind of repayment. Well, unless Lyra had sworn herself to the Lady, but that was just...not actually that absurd an implication, now that she was thinking about it.

If Lyra was a black mage in service to Chaos, that would go a _long_ way toward explaining how the hell she'd ended up in this universe anyway. Not to mention her complete lack of human feeling and ridiculously advanced magical skills — Blacks who made the Choice sacrificed their humanity for power, it was part of the Covenant. Though that implied that _Bella_ was _also_ a black mage, her personality was far too similar to Lyra's for only one of them to have done it. Which..._also_ wasn't an unreasonable conclusion to come to...though if Bella was dedicated, it was probably to a different Aspect. The War would probably have gone better if they'd had the Lady Herself on their side. But that (and why Narcissa had never been told, if she was indeed correct) was something to contemplate later.

Of course, none of it made Lyra any less terrifying or suggested that Draco shouldn't avoid her at all costs.

"Say something so I know you can."

"Yes, mother," he answered automatically.

"Very good, Draco. You may be excused."

He fled.

Narcissa sighed. They were probably going to have to have that entire conversation again, once the shock of Lyra being so very _Bellatrix_ had worn off. On the plus side, however, perhaps this entirely disturbing little interaction would help the concept of choosing one's battles to sink in a bit.

(If she was _very _lucky, he might even manage to make the connection between choosing one's battles and her plan for the Allied Dark, but that might be too much to hope for.)

* * *

_Hey, look, Harry's not the only character who occasionally acts like a regular fourteen-year-old!_

_Once again, I am bad at writing notes. More politics things will be mentioned as needed in the story, but we're not going to put out any sort of guide to the political situation. (Pretty sure someone asked about that at some point...) —Leigha_

_Someone asked us to, like, throw together a fucking wiki with worldbuilding and political stuff in it and, come on, nobody got time for that shit. Who do you think we are? _xD _—Lysandra_


	10. The Official Position of House Black

"And Lyra said that if anyone was giving us any trouble about it, I should contact you. I understand the House of Black has a retainer agreement."

Andromeda raised an eyebrow at the rather annoyed, slightly harried-looking muggle woman who had, rather to her surprise, managed to find her way to her office. Not that she doubted any part of Dr. Granger's account.

She was well aware of Lyra's decision to take Harry Potter on holiday anonymously. Lyra, of course, hadn't considered the legal implications of such a plan for the slightest moment, but Mirabella had consulted her regarding potential consequences and the extent to which she could safeguard against them without giving away Lyra's plans. And Andromeda _had_, of course, just acquired a block of Knockturn Alley (which included the property Lyra had incidentally destroyed) on behalf of the House of Black, the paperwork back-dated to avoid an arson charge — though there might still be an accusation of improper demolition on the horizon. And when it was discovered that they had 'acquired' the property only days before Lyra removed Harry, it would only serve as further evidence that Lyra was indeed responsible. But that revelation had been inevitable in any case — she and Mira had already taken steps to ensure that both the Blacks and the Zabinis would weather the storm relatively unscathed.

She was equally aware of the open letter Hermione Granger had written to Xeno Lovegood for publication in the Quibbler. It was, she suspected, an honest attempt, initially, to ameliorate the emotional damage Lyra's plan was likely to cause to the nation at large. There was certainly no indication that she _intended_ to sabotage Dumbledore's credibility in the letter itself. But then Xeno had interviewed her, informally, from the presentation in his accompanying article, most likely just to clarify some of the points she had made. And in the course of that interview, it had come up that Dumbledore had attempted legilimency on the girl without her permission.

He'd stopped when she turned away his probe, but, as Xeno rightly pointed out, occlumency was a rarely-taught skill anymore. How many other students' minds had been casually violated, without their _knowledge_, let alone their permission? Muggleborns, of course, had little reason to learn the skill, or even know of its existence unless one of their more knowledgeable peers mentioned it, but it had always been a relatively rare practice among commoners in general outside of a relatively small set of occupations, and those tended to learn it as adults. The only _children_ who could be reasonably expected to recognise and turn away a legilimency probe in this day and age were the children of nobles — and those raised in the more paranoid Houses, at that.

Xeno had printed an Emergency Issue including Miss Granger's letter, the report of his interview, a long opinion piece on the use of mind magic on children, and several articles detailing other questionable decisions Dumbledore had made over the course of the past few decades. Andromeda was aware of some of these — Nymphadora had kept her abreast of his disastrous hiring choices for the Defense professorship, for example — but the political climate had always been such that, when these decisions were brought to public attention, they quickly faded out of the news cycle, and as far as she knew no one had published a systematic review of them in the intervening years.

Xeno had obviously recognised that Miss Granger was telling the truth in her letter, realised that it was only a matter of time until the Chief Warlock's reputation as a legitimate authority shattered under the revelation that Harry Potter was _not _in fact dead — if he was simply on holiday, presumably he would reappear within a matter of months — and decided that this was the opportune moment to remind everyone that the illustrious Albus Dumbledore was not as infallible as he might seem when the events in his political record were examined individually.

Andromeda didn't _think_ he had realised that Dumbledore would recant quite as quickly as he had, however.

And she was fairly certain he hadn't predicted that the Chief Warlock would proceed to attempt to undermine the credibility of Miss Granger's claims with the assistance of a bevy of more..._pro-establishment_ reporters from the Prophet and the Herald.

Miss Granger's residence would have been registered with the DLE by the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes (as was the address of every underage muggleborn) when she'd begun to have accidental magic incidents. Andromeda would be surprised if it had taken more than an hour or two for the first enterprising young reporter to bribe a clerk into revealing it. And so the Grangers had been besieged by the paparazzi.

They couldn't get _onto _the property, as Lyra had had the foresight, apparently, to ward the house against magical intruders at some point earlier in the year — which was...somewhat unexpected, both because Bella didn't tend to care about collateral damage, and because Andromeda hadn't realised she was capable of warding a house by herself. But it hadn't taken long for the reporters to realise that it was _very _odd for a muggle property, even one belonging to the family of a muggleborn witch, to have wards _at all_.

_Then_ someone had _analysed_ the wards, discovered that there were elements intended to foil attention by the authorities and the detection of underage magic, and immediately stuck it in their article for today's morning edition of the Prophet.

As soon as it had been delivered to the Grangers' home, Dr. Granger had set out for London with an anti-Muggle Repelling amulet and the address of Andromeda's public offices. Which was, Andromeda thought, quite the most intelligent thing she could have done because, with Albus Dumbledore's reputation on the line, the Ministry would almost certainly have already sent representatives to examine the wards. Someone was probably organising a team of cursebreakers as they spoke. In fact, the Grangers probably ought to have contacted Andromeda as soon as they realised their daughter's claims had been reported in what was essentially a hit piece against the head of the government, but Dr. Granger could be forgiven for not realising that "go tell my solicitor that it's all my fault" extended to far more than just the existence of illegal wards on the Grangers' property.

(They _should_ have told her when Lyra put up the bloody wards in the first place, but Andromeda decided she would blame Lyra herself for that oversight, since she _was_ the one who was liable for circumventing muggle protection laws, here.)

"Julian!" she called. Her intern appeared in her doorway so quickly Andromeda suspected that he had been eavesdropping rather than attending to any legitimate work. "Be a love and calculate some apparition coordinates for me?"

"Uh, sure. What's the address?"

After Dr. Granger told him, Andromeda added, "It's warded. Find the nearest crossroad."

"Willow and Tilby," the muggle said promptly. After he disappeared, she added, "Dare I ask _why_ you need apparition coordinates for my house?"

Andromeda sighed. "Unfortunately, Dr. Granger, there are likely to be Ministry representatives there already. Time is of the essence if we are to address the issue before they remove the illegal wards from your property, allowing the reporters free access to your home immediately upon the departure of the DLE cursebreakers — the Department of Law Enforcement, that is. While we wait for the coordinates, we should discuss the options we might take to address the issues at hand."

"Which are?"

"The simplest option is to legally bring your family under the protection of the House of Black," she explained, trying to keep this as straightforward as possible. "The least invasive way to do this is to issue a formal statement on behalf of the House of Black stating that your daughter has their full support, Harry Potter is on holiday with Sirius and Lyra, and any further inquiries as to his well-being should be directed to me as their solicitor."

"Can you do that? Make official statements without consulting the family? Or would we need to wait for some sort of authorisation? Because we're leaving for France in two days. I would very much like to get this little...incident cleared up before we go."

Andromeda gave her a rueful grin. "No, a solicitor on retainer cannot speak on behalf of the Head of a House they represent without their consent. But, well...you _are _aware that the current Acting Head of House Black is...a bit eccentric. And I have closer connections to the House than most in my position would. I presume you are familiar with the concept of a blank cheque?" Dr. Granger nodded warily, obviously thinking that Andromeda couldn't be going _exactly _where she thought she was going with this. "I have in my possession several blank contracts, signed and notarised this past January, which I am authorised to use however I see fit in order to protect the interests of the House. Of which your family is one, apparently."

The muggle gaped at her. "That can't _possibly _be legal."

"Oh, it is, I assure you." Granted, it was also _phenomenally stupid_, just handing off that sort of authority to _anyone_ outside of the House. When Lyra had suggested it, Andromeda had been every bit as shocked as Dr. Granger. But it _did_ make covering Lyra's arse considerably easier, being able to authorise herself to acquire properties on behalf of the House, for example, or issue formal statements in Lyra's name. "Consider it a sort of blanket pre-authorisation for any actions I may be required to take to clear up any..._problems_ she might create for herself. In any case, yes, I can make an official statement on Lady Black's behalf."

"I..._see_." Dr. Granger's tone suggested that she didn't entirely believe this, but also didn't care, so long as _her _problem was solved. "So, what, we just write out a statement and present it to the reporters and order them to get the bloody hell out of my garden?"

"Well...we could. We _should_, in fact."

"I sense a _but_ coming," the other woman said drily.

Andromeda gave her a small smile. "_But_, it probably won't be enough. The reporters are not legally obligated to obey such a statement. It is essentially social pressure and little more. Yes, the House might take steps to sanction individuals should they fail to respect the expressed desire for privacy on behalf of their ally, but in the meanwhile they would still be free to harass you and your daughter, with no legal recourse other than to call the DLE and accuse them of trespassing."

Dr. Granger sighed. "And given the nature of Hermione's article, it is all too easy to believe that the authorities of Magical Britain are themselves not likely to be interested in pursuing such accusations."

She nodded. "_And_ they'll still remove the wards 'for your own protection', and Lyra will still be liable for enacting them in the first place. The simple measure I suggested earlier is...not the least invasive. In fact, it is probably the most drastic option available. But it is, I believe, the most elegant long-term solution to the problem."

"And that solution _is_?"

"To register the House of Granger as a Common House, incorporating all of your lands, people, and incomes as property of the House, and simultaneously enter into a patronage agreement as vassals of the House of Black."

In fact, it would probably only be possible to register the Granger family as a Common House if they were vassals to a Noble House — the process of House registration was _notoriously _labyrinthine, especially when the only witch in the family was underage and held no qualifications to speak of.

Dr. Granger eyed her warily. "What exactly would such a patronage agreement entail?"

"Technically? Your patron House would have dominion over your people and property. You would be subject to your patron house's internal laws, and exempted in many ways from the laws of Magical Britain. You would tithe a percentage of your income to your patron — your patron is obliged to pay taxes on your behalf to Magical Britain, so you wouldn't need to worry about that—" The tax burden placed on newly-registered Common Houses was often a prohibitive factor for muggle families. "—and in exchange, the patron house provides protection for its vassals in whatever capacities their House Law stipulates."

"You have my attention."

Andromeda gave the muggle a coolly professional smile. "House Black takes this obligation rather more seriously than most Noble Houses — their vassals are, in effect, considered legal members of the House of Black, though obviously members of vassal Houses are not integrated into the Black Family Magic. If you require physical protection, the House of Black is obligated to provide that protection. If you are involved in a legal challenge, they provide representation. In the case of honor duels, you are entitled to name a member of the House of Black as your champion. They also provide financial support if needed, start-up capital for any business endeavors you might choose to pursue — though the Head of the House has to approve that, as they would for any member of the House — and education expenses, arrange apprenticeships and employment contracts, conduct business deals on your behalf with other Noble Houses, and represent your interests in the Wizengamot."

Over the course of her recitation, Dr. Granger's eyes narrowed into a suspicious frown. "I assume this relationship would not be so heavily weighted in our favor as you imply. What's the down-side?"

"Ah. Well. There are a couple of things that are a bit...foreign, compared to modern muggle law and convention. As a rule, members of a Noble House do not have personal property or personal wealth. You would keep most of your income as per your tithe agreement, but as far as Magical Britain would be concerned any properties you own in the muggle world would become properties of the House of Black in Magical Britain. Which would mean that Lyra was well within her rights to place wards around your house, and if the reporters refused to respect the order to get out of your bloody garden the House of Black would be able to take much stronger, more immediate measures against them. They wouldn't be able to do anything to or with your property without your permission, but you equally wouldn't be allowed to sell it to anyone outside the House of Black and its vassals without the permission of the Head of House.

"Thank you, Julian," she added, glancing at the slip of parchment he had handed her, and the coordinates written upon it. They seemed to be reasonable enough. She assumed the delay was due to his checking them thoroughly. Apparating based on an abstract understanding of _where exactly _your destination was, as with the coordinate system, was difficult. All the more-so if you were envisioning the wrong point on the theoretical grid overlying the country. It was, however, much faster than (and therefore preferable to) any other method of travel at their disposal. He slipped back out with a nod, probably to continue listening at the door. He really was incorrigible, but it was as good a way for him to learn as any, she supposed.

"Noble Houses and their members," she continued, considering how best to wrap up her explanation, "including, in this case, members of vassal Houses, have more rights and privileges in Magical Britain than individuals with no House affiliation and Houses unaffiliated with the nobility. Their representatives also make up the overwhelming majority of the legislative and judicial aspects of our government. Individual members of Noble Houses, however, have far less autonomy and fewer individual rights than individuals in the United Kingdom, or unaffiliated mages, or members of most Common Houses, depending on the specifics of their House Laws. Individual members of the House of Black do not have the right to make legally binding contracts without the approval of the Head of the House, for example. This runs the gamut from selling your house to arranging your daughter's marriage, and the degree of autonomy granted to individuals is dependent almost exclusively on the discretion of the Head of the House.

"Lyra is hardly likely to disapprove of anything you decide to do. Sirius almost equally so. Lyra's immediate predecessor, however, was not nearly so lenient. In the interests of full disclosure, I did leave the House of Black for exactly that reason. The rights and responsibilities of the Head of House and subordinate members of the House and vassal Houses are outlined specifically in the House Laws, of course, and vassal Houses may choose to leave or be disowned under certain circumstances, as can individuals, but... When mages refer to the _Lord_ of a House, they mean it in a very feudal manner."

The muggle woman swallowed hard, had to clear her throat before she spoke. "That— I would need to discuss such a decision at length with my husband, and Hermione. We couldn't possibly—"

Andromeda smirked. "Such a contract would be a _long-term _solution, Dr. Granger. If nothing else, you'd want to look over the House Law first, and we hardly have the time to write a proper agreement today. I _can_, however, extend the offer, in writing, signed by the Acting Head of the House and back-dated well before your house was warded. If we don't come to an official agreement by the date we specify, the offer becomes void. In the meanwhile, however, your family and your property fall into a sort of grey area, legally speaking. Technically, Lyra would have been overstepping her legal bounds by putting up those wards, but if it's understood that you're in the process of negotiating a vassalage agreement, it would be seen as...being a bit overzealous and premature, but not the sort of thing really worthy of prosecution, especially under muggle protection laws. And they would only have to be reversed if the vassalage offer fell through."

Dr. Granger relaxed considerably at that suggestion. "Right, so we stall, then. _That_ I can certainly agree to."

"Excellent." She grinned, unlocking the box containing the blank contracts Lyra had signed back in January. "Give me five minutes, and then we can go evict the squatters in your garden." This was going to be _fun_.

* * *

"Hey, Meda," Lyra said, collapsing into one of her sister's visitors' chairs.

Meda startled, looking up from an ancient tome which was presumably _fascinating_, if she really hadn't noticed Lyra coming into her office. She _had_ cracked the wards a while ago and exempted herself so they wouldn't ping when she came in, but just for practice, she hadn't really been trying to be sneaky.

"Lyra? I thought you— Why aren't you in California?"

"Well, because _Zee's_ in California. Which means her house is empty right now. Which means this is pretty much the best time to strip out her old wards and implement the system I designed over Easter." She let her head fall back, closed her eyes.

She'd overestimated her ability to implement her design. (_Again_. Ciardha would never let her live it down, if he was alive in this timeline.) She _had _designed the system so that she could empower it in sections and rest for a day or so between them without the active parts destabilising and ruining everything, but the sections were just a _little_ too complex to be comfortable to hold in her head all at once, just a _little_ too extensive to activate without edging dangerously close to knocking herself out. Which was better than it _could_ be, her first major solo project she actually had passed out in the middle of empowering the runes, collapsed the whole thing on top of herself and very nearly died (according to Ciardha, he might have been exaggerating). It was still kind of annoying, though, because she _knew_ she'd considered this at some point, she distinctly remembered thinking that it wouldn't be a problem. Which, if she were as mad at the moment as she had been when she'd been writing the thing, it probably _wouldn't_ be, but.

She'd quit early today, because overestimating her abilities when _designing _the system was one thing. Overestimating herself in the middle of _setting it up_, committing a fundamental error because she was too mentally overextended to see straight, and ruining the entire project would be _much _more embarrassing. And annoying. Especially since the old wards were gone, now, so she'd have to start over on the new ones.

"And I thought I should take a break before I go back."

"Go back?"

"Well, yes, obviously. I have a portal to Ancient House—"

"Of course you do," Meda muttered.

Lyra smirked at her. "Makes for a pretty easy commute. But anyway, I saw a very interesting article this morning in the Prophet. Yesterday's Prophet, it takes a while to get the news over there, even with portal post. Did you really offer a formal alliance to Emma Granger? Or is Harris making shite up again?"

"Ah. That."

That sounded...like a yes? Maybe? She dragged her eyes open to see Meda looking at her with a rather peculiar expression. Fuck it. "That wasn't an answer."

Her sister crossed her arms defensively, glared at her. "Well, you were the one who gave me permission to do whatever I needed to in your name to fix your messes. And I have to say, this one is a _bit _more complicated than just burning down a building no one cared about anyway. If I'd had more time, I might have been able to come up with something less...extreme, but the DLE already had cursebreakers on the scene. And I _still _had to sweet-talk Amelia Bones out of pressing charges, you know, even _with _the vassalage offer. Why didn't you tell me you warded a muggle property?"

Lyra shrugged. "Because it didn't seem that important at the time?"

"How could it _not seem important_, Lyra? I— This is a _major_ violation of muggle protection statutes!"

"Do you really expect me to be able to answer that question?" Because that sounded suspiciously like one of those _explain why you don't understand_ questions. "In my defense, though, people don't really take that sort of thing very seriously in my universe. And, how was I supposed to know that Maïa was going to start doing things like publicly humiliating the Chief Warlock, getting attention from everybody and their mum? I have to say, I was _not _expecting that."

Meda's lips twitched slightly. "Well, she _does_ spend a considerable percentage of her time with you, as I understand it. You were bound to start rubbing off on her eventually."

"I think there's a joke in there somewhere, but I'm too tired to figure it out."

"What?"

"Nothing, I've been spending too much time with Siri and Blaise, that's all." Really, she'd had no idea how many unintentional innuendos and potential puns cropped up in everyday conversation until those two were in the same room. "So, I take it you _did_ make a formal patronage offer, then?"

"Yes, I did." That peculiar expression was back.

_Do you want a hint?_

_No, don't tell me, I'll figure it out! _

Eris laughed at her, which Lyra ignored as best she could, trying to focus. Suspicion? No, that didn't make any sense... Wariness? Trepidation? One of those vaguely-nervous emotions? ...Maybe. Eris didn't say she was wrong, so she was probably close enough, but..._why_? Leaving aside the fact that it was kind of silly for Meda to care about her reaction — it wasn't like Lyra would hurt her — she _had_ considered doing the same thing herself, and she _had_ known what she was doing when she'd given Meda permission to act in her name.

"Oh, okay. Just checking."

"You're...okay with this. You know we can't rescind the offer, if they decide to take it, we — _you_ — _will _have to follow through."

"Uh...yeah? How long did you give them to think it over?"

"Well, I didn't know if you'd be okay with this—"

"Why wouldn't I be okay with it? I mean, I was going to wait and make the offer when I get Emma to be our Wizengamot proxy, but—"

"Wait — _what_?"

"There's precedent." Lyra couldn't quite keep a straight face saying that. There _was_, though. Going all the way back to Salazar fucking Slytherin, actually. His father was a muggle, voted their seat for _years_. Granted, they hadn't really had a strong division between muggles and mages back then, and most Houses didn't have anything approaching a reliable history from that far back, so people couldn't be counted on to _know_ about that, but there were more recent precedents, too. "Can you see the look on Lucy's face when he finds out? Or _Bletchley_?"

"Are you— You're _serious _about this? You're going to let a _muggle_ vote the Black seat."

"Yep. Well, I'm going to convince Siri to do it — pretty sure if I do it as the Acting Head, people will start looking into my background more closely trying to find a way to get rid of me. But yes. She's great. Reminds me of Auntie Dorea, but more ruthless."

Meda's eyes narrowed slightly, but she didn't debate the comparison. Which, she _had_ met her, so. "Does she know anything about the political situation she'd be stepping into? At _all_?"

"I've filled her in on some things. She's very Slytherin, she'll pick it up. How long did you say you gave her to decide?"

"Lammas. I wasn't sure you'd approve, and she seemed wary of the idea, so—"

"—so you gave her a short deadline so she wouldn't have time to decide and, being a generally reasonable person, would say no."

Smart, if the goal was to keep the Grangers from agreeing. But it _wasn't_.

Emma _was _going to vote their seat. (It had taken all of twenty minutes talking to Sirius to realise he had no interest in politics to speak of, Emma wouldn't turn down the chance to actually have some influence in her daughter's world, and Lyra _really _wanted to see what she would do with that influence.) Being a vassal of the House would give her some legitimacy, not to mention a degree of standing in Magical Britain beyond the Wizengamot chamber.

And if Maïa was planning on making a habit of pissing off the most powerful people in Britain, she was going to need powerful allies. Lyra was pretty sure that formalising that aspect of their relationship would be less awkward than if she just went around fighting duels and solving problems for her without some kind of agreed-upon reciprocation. She hadn't missed how weird Maïa could get when Lyra did things like buying books for her, or warding her parents' house, or pointing Tyche in Draco's direction after he hexed her on one of the rare occasions he managed to catch her alone. (She still didn't know how he'd thought she wouldn't find out about that. Granted, _Maïa _hadn't told her, but there were house elves everywhere, it hadn't been hard to figure out who'd sent her to Pomfrey with a nasty case of knee reversal.)

"Well, yes."

"Eh, fine, I'll talk to her, extend it to Samhain. Did you give her a copy of the relevant sections of the House Law?"

Andromeda rubbed at her temples, shaking her head as though she couldn't believe they were having this conversation. "Of course I did. And _then_ she asked for the _rest _of it. Said something about needing to know how the laws could be changed, wanting the whole picture of how the House operates."

Lyra grinned. She would expect nothing else from a Granger, honestly. "Do we even have an English translation of the whole thing?" Because the one _she'd_ had to memorise was in Welsh.

Meda gave her a very flat, unamused look. "No. I sent it out for translation, I'm going to have to courier it to her in France."

"You sent it out? Don't you know any translation spells?"

"Of course I do. What I don't have is a spare thirty hours to sit around transcribing it."

Well, that was fair, she supposed. Even if she could get through the actual translation in a reasonable amount of time, which, honestly, Lyra didn't actually know how long it took other people to run through something like that, it would still take a while to copy it out with real ink on real paper. Enchanted quills were _much_ faster than writing by hand, but if she had to guess, she'd say that the _whole thing_ — even just the most recent revision, not including the historical versions of sections that had been altered over the centuries — was over three-hundred feet long on standard parchment. Conjuring a copy, though, wouldn't take more than a couple of hours, maybe one more to check it and anchor the conjuration well enough to keep it stable for a few months.

"I'll do it, I have to go talk to her about extending the consideration period anyway." While she was at it, she could get Maïa's comments on her theory treatise. That was almost done, she just needed to know whether there were any points that didn't make sense from the perspective of someone who didn't really know anything about deep magic. "You can have your copy bound for the Library. I presume she told you where they're staying?"

Meda sighed, summoned a file from the shelf behind herself, copied the address onto a scrap of parchment for her. "You're impossible, you know that, right?"

Lyra gave her a rather sleepy grin. "Usually people say _insane_, but yes."

Her baby sister rolled her eyes. "That too."


	11. You wrote a book!

"I could say—"

"AH!" Hermione started at the sudden chirp of a _very_ familiar voice in what was _supposed_ to be an empty room, so hard her book tipped out of her lap, nearly fell to the floor before she caught it by one cover.

"—I'm surprised you're sitting inside reading a book on holiday in France but I'm really not. You okay there, Maïa?"

For a moment Hermione just glared, waiting for her heart rate to drop back to normal. She was surprised, okay, which was perfectly understandable — Lyra just _appearing_ with absolutely no warning in her room at her _muggle grandmère_'s house _in France_ was pretty much at the bottom of the list of things she'd expected to happen today.

(Was what she _would_ be saying, but even she couldn't entirely believe it. She knew Lyra by now, this was exactly the sort of insane thing she did without a thought.)

Though she couldn't let the silence go too long, without conversation to distract herself she... Well, okay, just, magical society was very...conservative, at times, and as much as she might not be like them in some ways Lyra _had_ been raised among them, had absorbed some of their habits. At school, she hadn't gone about like this, just a vest and tiny little shorts, Hermione could feel the urge to _stare_ come on, and— "Er, what are you doing here?"

One bare shoulder (_Stop it_, Hermione, act normal, _Jesus_...) twitched in a shrug. "I had a day to myself, thought I'd drop by. I finished that translation of the—"

"Wait, no, you _can't_ just pop into— This is my _muggle grandmother's house_, Lyra!"

Lyra blinked. "Oh. Right. Honestly, that didn't even occur to me, sometimes I completely forget about the whole...muggleborn thing."

...No, she had no idea how to feel about that. "How did you even _find_ me at— No, forget that, you can't— Lyra, you have to go. They could come home at any time, and I can't really explain you being here."

For a second, Lyra just stared at her, her face a picture of bafflement. "Well, _finding_ you wasn't hard at all, I just shadow-walked straight to you. I don't _have_ to know where you are, as long as you're not under wards that can block it — and that's not likely, warding against shadow magic is _hard_ — I can always get to you, whenever I want."

She... Hermione should probably be more unnerved by that thought than she actually was.

"And I'm _mostly_ sure I only felt—" She abruptly cut off, frowning to herself. "Oh, I probably wouldn't have felt muggles through shadows, if I wasn't specifically looking for them. Er. But you said they're not home?"

Hermione grit her teeth. "Dad and Grandmother are out. I don't know when they'll be back."

"Oh, well, clearly it's fine then — I can leave just as easily as I came, I should have time to slip away whenever they do show up." That was probably true, but... "So, Emma's here? I do need to talk to her."

"You tracked me down in France to talk to my mother?" She couldn't _quite_ keep a note of bitter resignation off her voice. This was..._one_ of the reasons, anyway, that she'd wanted to put off Lyra meeting her parents as long as possible, Mum had a way of, just, taking over _everything_.

"Well, that's not the _only_ reason, but I finished translating the House bylaws into English — which was a bitch, let me tell you, apparently Fourteenth Century Welsh legalese is a thing — and I told Meda I'd get that to Emma as soon as I had it done, and I did want to make it clear just how light-handed of a Lady Black I intend to... Well, Sirius is going to be the Lord of the House now, I guess, at least legally, but I'm sure he wouldn't—"

"What the hell are you talking about, Lyra?"

She blinked. "Didn't you know about the vassalage offer? I mean, I'm _certain_ that got into the _Prophet_ — the article I saw about it was padded out with far more speculation than is entirely sensible, but I can't imagine you could have missed it."

"Oh," Hermione muttered, her brow collapsing into a frown. _That_. Yes, she had heard about that.

It was, in a way, her own fault that it had ever happened — or, to be more precise, that it had ever _needed_ to happen. It had perhaps been a bit naïve of her, sending that letter of hers into the _Quibbler_. She'd thought it would...well, set the record straight, she guessed. Not many people believed a single bloody thing the _Quibbler_ said, but that wasn't really the point. She hadn't expected it to change anything in the short term, so much, she doubted the Lovegoods' ridiculous conspiracy rag would change most anyone's mind at all, she'd just wanted to...

Honestly, it had been intended as a statement more than anything, a gesture, more meaningful in the doing of it than any direct consequence. Even if she hadn't been quite conscious of it at the time. Lyra had put her in a corner, Dumbledore had put her in a corner, and _everyone_ was being, just... She'd been lashing out, she could admit that now. She'd _known_ it would be damaging to Dumbledore and the Ministry, their reputation, and she hadn't cared, at some level that'd been the _whole point_ — she'd wanted to prove to Dumbledore he wasn't as powerful (or as convincing) as he thought he was, she'd wanted to prove to Lyra that she couldn't stop her from doing what she felt was right (even if Lyra _had_ technically won their argument about it), she'd wanted to prove to all those _idiots_ in the _entire bloody country_ that...

...that they _were_ idiots, she guessed? She didn't know, she wasn't convinced anymore she'd been thinking nearly as clearly as she'd thought she'd been at the time.

(People said hindsight was twenty-twenty, but personally she was almost always _more_ uncertain in the aftermath than in the moment.)

It just hadn't occurred to her at the time that, in having that bloody letter published, that she was drawing _far_ more attention to herself and her family than she was comfortable with. Mum had solved the problem very quickly — which was quite impressive, really, but Mum _was_ impressive sometimes — so Hermione hadn't really had it in her to complain about exactly _how_ she'd done it.

Even if it made her _extremely_ uncomfortable. If Hermione understood the concept correctly, Mrs. Tonks had gotten the bloody magical press and even the _Ministry_ to back off by...essentially _claiming_ her family for the House of Black. In a sort of...serfdom kind of way. Hermione _didn't_ understand exactly what was going on too well, it was just so foreign and _weird_, and Mum had been _very_ clear that it wasn't official, just saying they were _considering_ it was a stalling tactic, basically, but...

If they were to do such a thing, as Hermione understood it, Lyra would be...her Lady, basically, in a feudal sense. Or, Sirius, technically, since he'd be in charge of the House once he was officially pardoned, but...

Hermione was _extremely_ uncomfortable with that.

Over these last couple weeks, Hermione had done a lot of thinking. About herself, exactly what kind of person she thought she was, what she wanted out of...everything, really. And about Lyra, and about their...relationship. ("Friendship" wasn't quite the right word, Lyra didn't really _do_ friends, but "association" seemed too light a term.) She'd done a _lot_ of thinking, and she was still a bit uncertain, and...not _scared_, exactly, but wary certainly, and she couldn't help the thought that she had completely lost her bloody mind, but...

She thought she knew what she wanted, and _that_ wasn't it.

They left Hermione's room — it had been her uncle Rèmy's once upon a time, but it'd been her room when in France for longer than she could remember — walking through the tight, moodily-lit halls of her grandmère's house toward the salon — Grandmère used that word for the living room even speaking Engilsh, which seemed sort of odd — where she knew her Mum would probably be, the whole way Lyra babbling off about...something about Sirius being more entertaining than she'd expected. From the things Hermione had heard about Sirius Black...she _would_ say she'd be concerned about the influence he might have on Lyra, but honestly she doubted it would make any difference. Lyra didn't need any encouragement to make a complete mess of things just for the fun of it.

(Hermione should probably disapprove of that more than she did, but, most of the time...)

"Yeah, I'm not surprised you're sitting reading on vacation either."

Mum, curled up on a chair with a book, glanced up as the two of them walked in...and that was it. Somewhat to Hermione's annoyance, Mum didn't seem surprised at all with Lyra, just, dropping in on them out of nowhere. Mum had apparently adapted to Lyra's Lyraness absurdly quickly, that wasn't at all fair. "Yes, well, what else am I to do when Dan is off with his mother's in-laws? _My_ in-laws are exhausting enough, I don't need the added burden of dealing with them another step removed."

Lyra just smirked at that, presumably at some internal joke, but she didn't say it aloud for the rest of them.

"Anyway, did you need something, Lyra?"

"Oh, nothing, just a bit of House business." Lyra sauntered over to the sofa, bonelessly flopped down to a seat. "Meda said you wanted a copy of the House law."

The soft, amused sort of smile on Mum's face instantly vanished. "Ah, yes. That."

While dropping to sit next to Lyra, Hermione noticed her reach behind her, seemingly pulling a loosely-rolled scroll of parchment out from between the cushions. Hermione was rather jealous of that...shadow-pocket...thing she did these days, but knew better than to ask Lyra to teach it to her — she knew enough about shadow magic to know she wouldn't be able to do it, still wasn't sure how Lyra had pulled it off. (It _would_ have gone on the list of evidence Lyra wasn't human, had Hermione still had doubts about that, because _seriously_?)

Lyra tossed the scroll over to Mum, who didn't quite manage to catch it, the thing tumbling to a halt in her lap. "I'm pretty sure that should be clear enough — the version I translated from was compiled in Thirteen Seventy-Six, excluding the amendments that are still relevant, but I _was_ taught to read Classical Welsh for exactly this sort of thing. If there are any questions just owl me...or Meda, I guess, I will be in America most of the summer. She can't clarify my translation, of course, but she will be able to clear up any questions about the code itself, should be fine."

Mum unrolled the scroll, enough to make out the first couple paragraphs — holding it rather awkwardly, which did make sense, she'd probably never read from a scroll before — giving Lyra a raised eyebrow over the top. "You read Classical Welsh, now?"

Shrugging, "Sure. And Latin. And Greek — though, my Koiné is better, Classical Greek is stupid."

It probably wasn't worth explaining to Lyra most of her confusion was _probably_ because there was no such thing as "Classical" Welsh in muggle academia. When mages said "Classical" Welsh — or Cambrian or simply British, some mages avoided using the word "Wales" — they were referring to the dialect used by the Wizengamot around the tenth century (also not coincidentally by the Founders of Hogwarts), which, obviously, any documents dealing with all that muggles had had access to would have been sealed away with everything else when the Statute was implemented.

Smirking, Mum spoke...in Latin. Because of course she did. Hermione _thought_ she might have recognised a word or two, but it was hard to tell — she could _read_ Latin...sort of...with the help of a dictionary...but she certainly couldn't _speak_ it. She was surprised Mum could, _apparently_.

Lyra smirked back, responded...in Latin. Because of course she did. Thankfully, she switched back to French immediately. (Hermione didn't notice until just now they'd been speaking French this whole time.) "Anyway, you really don't have to worry about...most of the Blacks' rights, so far as your family's affairs go. I'm not likely to stop you from doing anything, unless it's too directly harmful to the interests of the House — which, I think you're smart enough not to do that, since the House of Black's power would also be yours. This is just easier, so far as I'm concerned. Straightens out some issues with you being our proxy, and Maïa picking fights with the Ministry." Lyra turned to Hermione, grinning. "That was _great_, by the way, watching Dumbledore and the D.L.E squirm over it is bloody hilarious."

Before Hermione could think of how to respond to that — that Lyra was enjoying the controversy (_partially_) unintentionally stirred up by her _Quibbler_ debut probably _should_ be a bad sign, but Hermione couldn't help feeling a bit smugly pleased — Mum had a question. "What's this about a proxy now?"

"Didn't I mention that?" Lyra blinked at the both of them for a moment, apparently confused. "Oh. Whoops? When a Lady or Lord of the Wizengamot sends someone else to vote in their stead, that proxy. I could have sworn I mentioned having you vote the Black seat."

Hermione sighed. "No, Lyra, I'm pretty sure you never told us about that." She wasn't certain Lyra would have thought to tell her — she had a bad habit of forgetting to inform people of their role in her schemes ahead of time — but Mum would have, at the very least.

"Oh. Well. How'd you like to be our proxy, then?"

For long seconds, Mum just stared at Lyra, expression peculiarly blank. "You...want to give me a seat in the magical Parliament."

"I wouldn't be _giving_ it to you — it'd still be the Black seat, you'd just be speaking for us. But sure, yes, basically."

"You're aware I know very little about magical government or politics."

"I'm sure you'll catch up," Lyra said lightly, shrugging, as though this concern were inconsequential. (Which was absurd, but, _Lyra_.) "Meda will help, of course, and there are a few introductions I'll arrange ahead of your investiture — Cissy, certainly, probably Lady Ingham, and Lord Peakes, and...Lady Smethwyck might be good, er, Tugwood, maybe Dunbar or Eirsley..."

"Er, Lyra?" The ridiculous girl cut off in mid-ramble, turning to blink at her. "You realise those are all Dark families, right?" At least, she _thought_ so — she didn't recognise Peakes at all, and she somehow hadn't realised Dunbar was even a Noble House, and the only one she knew was in Gryffindor, but...

Lyra blinked. "And...this is a problem?"

No, Hermione was not getting into a discussion about politics right now. Not when there was a far simpler issue she could bring up instead. "You do remember Mum is a muggle. How many of these people will even be willing to meet with her?"

"I am leaving out the worst pureblood nationalists on purpose, Hermione." (The use of her full name was a subtle sign she was a little annoyed, she didn't miss it.) "The Dunbars have had a few prominent marriages with muggleborns by now, the Smethwycks and Peakes have always been subtly anti-Statutarian, the Tugwoods and Eirsleys are more conservative communitarian families, they've always thought the blood purity thing is silly, and, back in the last war, the Inghams and the Monroes were the most visible opponents of the Death Eaters among the Dark — you also might notice that, despite being two of the few remaining Ancient Houses left, they're _not_ counted among the Sacred Twenty-Eight, maybe ask yourself why that is. I might not care about this stuff much, but I _did_ get a proper pureblood education, I do know these things."

Okay, well... Honestly, sometimes Hermione _still_ forgot that "Dark" and "Death Eater" were hardly synonymous — she had learned more recently the situation was far more complicated than the impression she'd originally been given, but she still reverted to older information without thinking, sometimes. "Fine, but you can't tell me the Malfoys will be happy with a muggle in the Wizengamot — the rest might not be, but they _are_ Death Eaters."

Lyra shrugged. "Lucy was, yes, but from the impression Cissy's given me she never did quite agree with the whole muggleborn genocide thing."

It took some effort for Hermione to hold in a disbelieving scoff — oh, she _never had quite_, that made it all better!

"Besides, she was never Marked, so she's technically _not_ a Death Eater, and she's the one who votes the Malfoy seat anyway. If it were Lucy, that might be a problem, but it's not, so. _And_ she's in negotiations right now to form a coalition between her Allied Dark and a few other Dark-leaning factions in the Wizengamot, factions which definitely did _not_ support Riddle — this is actually great timing, Emma will be able to get in on the ground floor with the new coalition, should do nicely. A lot of them won't be _happy_ about it, but they won't make too much trouble, I don't think. It will be a bit of a scandal, obviously, but it won't be so bad Emma won't be able to get anything done. It might actually go some way to getting her in with the right people, and skewing the reputation of our House the way I want it to go, so, it's a win-win-win-win, basically.

"Besides, if anyone does anything _too_ stupidly racist, she can always bait them into an honour duel and have me kick the shite out of them for her. That's one of the advantages to the vassalage thing, she can ask a Black to stand in as champion — and that's internal Black law, so whoever it is might not know that, will be _hilarious_ when they find out. There's a litany of other benefits too, of course, but you get the point. Having that set up before you take the seat," Lyra said, turning back to Mum, "would probably be a good idea, just in case someone does something stupid. But, it shouldn't be _too_ much of a problem. There _is_ precedent."

Hermione frowned. "There's precedent for a muggle voting in the Wizengamot."

"Sure. Salazar bloody Slytherin's father was a muggle, he spoke for the family for, what, a couple decades, I think. That was a thousand years ago, there _are_ more recent examples, but still."

"_Slytherin's father was a muggle?!"_

Jerking back at the sudden volume — which, okay, wasn't entirely necessary, but _really_ — Lyra gave her an odd, confused sort of look. "Er, obviously? Doesn't everyone know that?"

_She_ certainly didn't. People could be very peculiar about Slytherin, simply suggesting such a thing would probably get an...unpleasant reaction from a lot of purebloods. "But... Didn't Slytherin _start_ the whole blood purity thing?"

Lyra had the gall to just look more confused than she'd been a second ago. "No? Really, Maïa, there was no such thing as purebloods a thousand years ago. The very concept is post-Statute, you know that."

Well, she did, obviously — there hadn't been any difference between muggle and magical society in the Founders' time, they hadn't segregated yet — it was Lyra's assumption everybody knew this that was the problem. "But, the story everyone always tells, about Gryffindor and Slytherin and..."

"Oh, that's interesting, actually. See, in the Thirteenth Century, a Dark Lord called Ignatius Gaunt took over...most of Scotland, I think, ruled from Hogwarts for a few decades, and _he_ started this mythology about Slytherin and muggleborns. Of course, back then it was about anti-Christianity, the blood purity angle never came up in the original version, but shortly after the Statute a few pureblood nationalist crazies decided to reframe it as part of an effort to legitimise their own ideology. People do that all the time, you know, it's sort of fascinating how they twist things around to suit their narrative. There are blood purists who believe it's all factual, of course, but...well, back in _my_ Nineteen Sixties at least, it was widely believed to be propaganda. Some people still believed it, but it'd gone out of fashion before I was even born. I almost forgot it stuck around here, honestly, it's hard to keep track of these things sometimes."

She didn't... That...

Okay, that sort of explained a lot, actually. Probably didn't help that they tended to skip that entire period in History of Magic class, a terrible oversight now that she thought about it...

"You do realise I already have a job."

Hermione had almost forgotten Mum was in the room. Turning back to her with a brilliant grin, Lyra said, "Are you saying you _don't_ want to use the wealth and influence of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black to antagonise a bunch of hidebound, reactionary, racist arseholes?"

A corner of Mum's lips twitched with a repressed smirk. "Well, when you put it like _that_..."

Er... Hermione had a _bad_ feeling about this. Lyra and _her Mum_ teaming up to mess with the entrenched powers of magical Britain, that could get...

There was a little bit more discussion, Lyra explaining she'd extended the negotiation window out to Hallowe'en (which she called Samhain, obviously) — apparently that was something the Lady of the House could just declare was so without needing any outside acknowledgement — but that it would be a good idea to finalise their arrangements before Mum took the Black seat in the Wizengamot. (Mum hadn't actually agreed to do that yet, Lyra just assumed she would, because Lyra.) They might actually want it squared away before school started up again, since the scandal around Hermione's letter would make her far more of a target for harassment than she had been already, just by virtue of being muggleborn.

Apparently, even many of the people outwardly accepting of muggleborns only truly tolerated them if they didn't get too uppity. They wanted quiet, meek muggleborns who were appropriately grateful of their betters' largesse in allowing them to integrate into magical society, and certainly not ones with independent, potentially inconvenient opinions. Hermione was rather taken aback by the scorn on Lyra's voice as she said it, but that wasn't too surprising when she thought about it, she'd heard Lyra go on rants about Light hypocrisy several times now.

Though she wasn't wrong — Hermione had noticed the same thing in old articles mentioning Lily Potter in the _Prophet_, even sometimes in how their classmates talked to her. A surprising number of the "good" purebloods were shockingly paternalistic in their attitudes about muggles and muggleborns, it was irritating.

After a little bit more about where to send whatever questions Mum might have about the (ridiculously extensive) House law — along with blasé reassurances that they _probably_ didn't matter, since Lyra was hardly likely to exploit them in any case (which, given Lyra's peculiar morality, was a good point) — she turned to Hermione, everything about her bearing and voice suggesting she'd just decided to dismiss the subject. "So, I put something together, I was wondering if you'd go over it with me."

"Er..." Hermione blinked at her for a second, trying to yank herself away from the vassalage topic. (It wasn't quite as scary as it'd been at first, but she was still very much _not_ comfortable with the idea.) "Go over what?"

Lyra reached into shadows again, this time pulling out a book. It wasn't professionally printed, hand-written script on loose sheets of parchment, what looked like a homemade adhesive potion forming a slapdash binding at one end. "I composed the letters I've been exchanging with Sam into a unified theory on deep magic, taking the more recent discoveries of muggle physicists into account. This is the first draft, it's not perfect as it stands — I'm not as well-read on this quantum stuff as I probably should be yet — but I'd like to get your impressions before continuing work on it."

"_Quantum stuff?"_ asked Mum, sounding rather amused.

"Yeah, I had to pick up a bit to explain some things in a way Sam would understand. Long story."

It took Hermione a few seconds to process this, the absurd realisation slowly percolating through her head. "You... You _wrote a book?!"_

"Sure." The shrug seemed easy enough, but the brilliant smirk suggested Lyra knew _exactly_ how ridiculous she was. "It's just fundamental theory at the moment, but I'll probably expand it into demonstrations of practical workings before looking to publish it. Want to take a look?"

There was really only one answer Hermione could give.

As odd and unsettling and _frustrating_ as Lyra could be at times, well, Hermione didn't think she'd ever looked more beautiful, sitting there smirking at her holding _a magical theory book_ she'd just _written in her spare time_.

(Hermione was in _so_ much trouble.)

* * *

"You know, I think that actually almost makes sense."

Lyra grinned. "Obviously, I'm a genius. Did you expect anything else?"

The exasperated little glare Maïa shot her just made her giggle.

They'd been going over a few of the opening definitions and concepts in her treatise for at least an hour now, sitting in the grass in a park a couple blocks away from Maïa's muggle grandmother's house. Apparently, once Maïa had realised what she was holding, she couldn't resist the urge to talk about it _right now_, but they couldn't stay at the house — they did both have a tendency to get wrapped up in this sort of thing, Maïa was worried the magic-ignorant members of her family would walk in on them and they'd have some awkward explaining to do. Personally, Lyra thought the rules about which of their relatives muggleborns were and were not allowed to tell about magic was bloody stupid. She'd nearly started an argument about, just, telling the rest of Maïa's family about it all anyway, it would certainly make things less complicated, but she suspected it wouldn't get anywhere. Not yet, anyway, give Maïa a couple more months, maybe.

It was especially stupid because there _were_ wards over the house. Or...she _thought_ there were, anyway. They were very basic, just some simple measures to prevent scrying and detect the use of harmful magics, but they were definitely there. What Lyra _wasn't_ certain of was whether they were actually intended for _that_ house, or one of the neighbours' instead. The narrow, winding streets of old European cities being what they were, the little houses were quite tightly packed together, the wards easily covered half the block. Either someone living in the area was a mage themselves, or had magical relatives who'd put up the wards for them. If it _were_ Maïa's family, she'd have expected to feel _something_ magical in the house, so it wasn't particularly likely, but...that Maïa had magical relatives _was_ still an elegant solution. It wasn't at all unusual for multiple muggleborns to crop up in the same family, after all — in fact, it was practically guaranteed, if they had a recent squib ancestor.

But, Lyra hadn't any proof, and Maïa certainly believed she was the only mage in the family, so it hadn't seemed worth arguing the point.

So far, they'd mostly just started with the fundamental stuff — defining a few terms, describing dimensions and fields and units, that sort of thing. Which meant Lyra's central insight that had led to writing all this came up almost right away. It had long been an obvious implication to magical theorists that there was some sort of connection between magic and physical matter. Magic could be made to simulate matter for a time, through transfiguration or conjuration, and while these effects were usually temporary, for all a purely physical examination would be able to determine the magically-created object was completely indistinguishable from the real thing. Ritual and more recent advances in physical alchemy could even make a conjuration _permanent_, essentially forcing magic to become matter. It was complicated, and a rare practice to this day, but indisputably possible.

Similarly, muggle physicists had come to the conclusion that physical matter, when it came down to it, wasn't anything special. She meant, the little bits that made up things weren't fundamentally different than what made up light, or electricity — it was just another sort of energy, the familiar mechanics of the physical world emerging from the interactions within it. The whole Big Bang thing had fascinating implications, that everything that existed now was essentially the ashes of what had come before, diffuse parts of what had been a single whole. That all of reality was made of the same, fundamental stuff.

When it came down to it, adding in magic to fill it out and bring the two perspectives together had been bloody obvious.

"I mean, it's still a bit..." Maïa flipped back to a previous page, eyes dancing over the script. "I get it conceptually, but if you weren't sitting here explaining it to me I'd have trouble. I think my maths isn't quite up to scratch." She sounded slightly bitter, as though annoyed with Lyra for being so much better than her at something, frustrated with herself for not being as good as she wanted to be.

"Well, that was sort of expected, wasn't it? This is mastery-level arithmancy and physics. I've been studying the former for years and the latter for months, you'll catch up."

For the first sentence or two, Maïa started to look annoyed, but it wiped away again by the end, replaced with a reluctant sort of smile. "Yes, well. I'm afraid until I do, I won't be much help with refining all this."

"That's true, I suppose." Lyra shrugged. "But I can wait, I'm not in any rush. It's not like I should be publishing this sort of thing until Sam and Mira start moving on...whatever it is they're planning, I never actually asked. I can give you the list of books I used, if you like. Or conjure copies, I guess. I would just give them to you but, I _do_ still need them for reference." Which wouldn't be a problem once they were back in Hogwarts, but if she wanted to get _any_ work done on this stuff before then...

Letting out a brief sigh, an odd sort of wariness about her, Maïa said, "I guess at this rate I'm going to be bored out of my skull in Arithmancy, aren't I."

"Why do you think I'm not taking it? Really, the only reason I'm bothering to take Runes next year is because I hear the professor is at least entertaining." Not to mention, she _should_ pick up a mastery or two eventually, if only to get people to stop questioning whether she knew what she was doing. It wasn't necessary she actually take the class for that, but she didn't have any connections in the field to exploit in this timeline. Babbling could function as an in just fine.

"Yes, well..." Slowly, reluctantly, Maïa closed the book, offered it back to her. "You should probably hold on to this until I'm caught up, at least."

"Er, that's your copy."

"It... What?"

"Yeah."

"Lyra, this..." Maïa blinked down at the book for a second. "This is _hand-written_. How long did this take you to make?"

She shrugged. "I dunno, the writing itself probably took a few days, I guess. Most of the material was already written elsewhere, I was just compiling it in a way that made sense. Er, that _is_ the only permanent copy I have at the moment, so don't damage it — I'm partway through writing out another one, copying from a blank book with text projected by a protean charm on _that_ one, so, I'd lose most of my work if this one is destroyed. But, well, explaining all this shite I've been figuring out with Sam to you is the whole reason I started this project in the first place."

Maïa just stared at her for a moment, her eyes wide. "Really?"

"Yeah, sure. I mean, that was the _original_ purpose, it wasn't until I was partway through that I realised I could refine it into something fit to publish pretty easily." Once Maïa was caught up enough to help her work out the kinks anyway. If only because Lyra had absolutely no idea if her reasoning would make sense to anyone else, she'd need her help to translate her ideas into normal person.

"You... You wrote a book..._for me_."

Lyra frowned back at Maïa, not really sure how to answer that question. For one thing, it wasn't a question — she _had_ just said that, and Maïa didn't sound like she doubted it. She definitely did sound _something_, though Lyra couldn't put her finger on what that was supposed to be. All soft and...she didn't know, voices were even harder to read than faces. She wasn't getting any help there either, Maïa still just sort of...blankly staring at her. It was weird. "Er...yes?"

That was sort of a question, one Lyra never did get an answer to. At least not a verbal one — just out and kissing her sort of was an answer, in its own way.

It was soft and quick, just a second or two, Lyra blinking at her, face suddenly blurry from being far too close to properly bring into focus. And then Maïa was sitting back again — not quite all the way back, still sitting rather closer than she'd been a moment ago — face shifting a few shades pinker as she glanced away. Okay, then. "So, I'm confused. Just to be clear, are we not pretending you don't want to kiss me anymore? Or are we going to be doing that again as soon as we're done here? 'Cause, I have to say, Maïa, if you keep going back and forth on me, you really can't blame me for not being able to keep it straight."

Maïa's eyes flicked back to her, flushing face pinching with a churlish sort of glare. "Lyra?"

"Yes, Maïa?"

"Shut up."

"Er, what—?"

Lyra couldn't even get the question out before Maïa was kissing her again. Which, again, was its own answer.

Now, she couldn't possibly say she was at all an expert with this...kissing thing. There'd been whatever the fuck had been going on with Zee back in her time, and then randomly snogging Blaise several times now. That was really all the experience she had in the subject — Maïa had kissed her once before, of course, but Eris had been house-sitting at the time — and she wasn't even entirely certain all that should count. Zabinis would be Zabinis, after all. With Zee, she'd just randomly kiss her sometimes, and Bella would just...go along with it, and that only toward the end of second year. Before then, she'd just kind of...stand there and wait for Zee to stop being weird and confusing. She hadn't really understood what was going on, at the time, just, didn't feel it was worth it to make Zee stop, since it wasn't like it _hurt_, or anything.

Honestly, she _still_ didn't really understand the snogging thing, even after doing it with Blaise all those times. In a slightly different way, she was still sort of, just, going along with it — Blaise was always the one that started it, and she was never _opposed_, she'd just never once felt the urge to kiss him first. It wasn't a _horrible_ thing to do with one's time, it could even be sort of fun, but Lyra could always find something to entertain herself with. (Besides, Blaise spent _a lot_ of his time around Harry lately, so it often wasn't even a conveniently available option either.) She wasn't sure the thing she found most fun about it was even something normal people would care about. She meant, yes, it could be nice — the neck-kissing in particular was _very_ pleasantly distracting — but the _best_ part was getting Blaise all worked up, making him want her, until it was _very_ obvious, it really couldn't be comfortable straining his trousers like that, and then just...getting up and _leaving_ him there, frustrated and disappointed. It was _far_ too much fun.

When she'd wondered to herself about that, Eris had once pointed out that it was quite possible she just enjoyed being able to say no, since it wasn't like Cygnus had ever given her that option. Which, she guessed that sort of made sense. She was never conscious of that at the moment, of course — she avoided remembering Cygnus had ever existed at all if she could help it — but it wasn't out of the question.

Point was, no, she _really_ still didn't understand this snogging thing. She didn't get why people did it, went so out of their way and put so much effort into getting people to do it with them, and it was just sort of silly, she didn't get it.

Snogging Maïa was subtly different, though, and she couldn't really say why.

_Aww, my baby ducky is starting to grow up, how precious._

Lyra took a second to imagine sticking out her tongue at Eris before returning to the matter at hand.

It couldn't be that Maïa was just better at it than either of the Zabinis. Lyra was hardly an expert, but she was certain she wasn't — Maïa had gotten those practice-snogs in with random people at Walpurgis (still hilarious, by the way), but the Zabinis were _the Zabinis_, they were _far_ more practiced than Maïa could possibly be at this point. Maïa certainly wasn't nearly as confident about what she was doing as either of them, more, just...well, hesitant, she guessed. Almost shy, which was weird, Lyra hadn't even realised until just now it was possible to _snog shyly_. She certainly wasn't _better_ at it.

In fact, Lyra kind of thought that might be the point.

It was just... This, snogging Maïa, was fun in a way that it simply hadn't been with either of the Zabinis. And, it took a moment for the realisation to properly form itself in her head, but she was getting the feeling that she... Zee and Blaise certainly knew what they were doing far more than Lyra did, she was...in a passive role, sort of. She certainly made a point with Blaise of making him work for it, but there was a power disparity at work there, one she hadn't even been entirely aware of until it'd gone and reversed itself on her.

Lyra had never been the _more_ confident snogging partner before. And that was, just...sort of...

..._fun_.

She couldn't even say what about it was so entertaining, what about what was happening right now was even that much different than snogging Blaise. It just was.

Also, when Lyra caught Maïa's lip with her teeth, the way she _squeaked_, that was just bloody _adorable_. Like, four-year-old Meda pouting -level adorable, _baby thestral_ -level adorable. It took some effort to stop herself from laughing — she had the feeling Maïa would react _quite_ badly to that — she almost couldn't help it, come on, that just wasn't fair.

"Stop, stop." Maïa's hands had come up to her shoulders, pushing her back a few inches, far enough their faces were no longer smushed together but close enough her floofy hair was still hiding half the park around them, her breath still playing across Lyra's face and neck. Her breathing had gone a bit heavier, so it was more noticeable than it would be.

Actually, Lyra was a bit out of breath herself, and she felt weirdly...tingly, she hadn't noticed that until now. It took a second to find her voice again. "Er, why?"

Maïa gave her another look, somewhere between exasperated and amused, she'd guess. "We're in public, Lyra."

"Yeah, in France. Nobody cares."

Blinking, she glanced around — as Lyra had expected, the few other muggles in the park were going about whatever it was they were doing, barely sparing two snogging teenagers a second look. And that was without magical assistance either. When they'd gotten here, Maïa had suggested not bothering to put up a paling, anyone who heard them would just assume they were talking about some fantasy novel or something. Pulling out a stick and waving it around would actually be _more_ conspicuous than just _talking_ about magic. (Which, that was a good point, Lyra was clearly a _great_ influence.) Maïa looked a bit surprised that nobody seemed to care, which...

Okay, that was just sort of silly. They were _in France_. Muggle France, but muggle France was _still France_.

"Er, still, I don't..." Maïa's face went a few further shades redder, now quite clearly avoiding her eyes. Her hands left Lyra's shoulders, drifting down, settling over her wrists, their hands loosely tangling across their laps. "I don't think— In public, just..."

"Yeah, I've noticed people can be weird about that sort of thing." Lyra still didn't fully understand the normal person...privacy thing. Like, against mind magic, she understood _that_, but everything else...

Maïa shot her another look, but Lyra was completely hopeless to read this one.

"So...is this going to be a thing now? I mean, it _was_ nice, but if we're going to go back to pretending you don't want to, you should probably tell me ahead of time." She'd never felt the urge to kiss _Blaise_ first, but this had been unexpectedly entertaining, and that squeak was just _unfairly_ adorable, she probably would.

"No, I..." Glancing away again, Maïa took a long breath, sounding peculiarly thin and shaky. A very familiar, Maïa-ish expression took over her face, a determined (if somewhat wary) kind of frown. "I think... I want to give it a try. You know, dating."

Except, Lyra _didn't_ know, really. She meant, she knew the _words_, obviously, but she couldn't _possibly_ mean... "Maïa, are you asking me to be your girlfriend right now?"

Maïa turned back to her with something that was _almost_ a pout, though not quite, a shade of irritation stopping it from getting all the way there. "Well, yeah, I guess."

That... She didn't...

_Eris!_

_Yes, my _bellatrice_?_

_Help!_

For a moment, the only response was a deep welling of amusement frothing from the back of her mind, a bouncing giggle she could almost feel echoing in her ears.

_That is NOT help!_

_I'm sorry, Lyra dear_— No, she wasn't. —_you're just so very cute sometimes, I can't help myself._ An image floated up from Eris, Lyra looking rather younger than she was, the familiar manifestation of her Patron ruffling her hair while image-Lyra pouted up at her.

_I'm serious, Eris, what do I do?_

_I'm sure I couldn't possibly make this decision for you._

_It's not about— Honestly, Eris, you know exactly what the problem is!_

_Yes, I do. And so do you. And I couldn't possibly make this decision for you._

_You are completely useless, and I hate you._

_As the children say, if lies make you happy. Besides, I do believe Hermione is trying to get your attention._

"Sorry, I, er..." Lyra blinked, yanking her focus back to the world around her. Maïa had obviously been saying something, but she hadn't caught it. "What was that?"

"I was just saying, if you don't want to, that's fine, I just..." Maïa looked _far_ more uncomfortable than she had a second ago, though Lyra couldn't say why, this was weird and confusing.

Which was sort of the problem. "It's not that I want to _not_, I just— _Ugh_." Lyra cut off, glaring pointlessly up at the sky. She debated how to go about this for a few seconds, but, fuck it, she'd always been shite at dancing around the point. "Okay, I'm just going to go for plain, brutal honesty here."

_That_ expression was perfectly readable — anxious wariness, sure that Lyra was about to say something...well, uncomplimentary, she guessed.

"No, it's nothing like that. I just... Look, okay, I like you, that should be bloody obvious by now — I _did_ start spending so much time with you for a reason, and you must have noticed I don't really do _friends_. And...well, if you want something, and if there's no particular reason why I shouldn't, I'm inclined to give it to you, just because you want it, and I can."

For some inexplicable reason, Maïa almost seemed disconcerted with that admission. Which, well, that should have been obvious — she didn't think Lyra had done things like, for example, breaking into McGonagall's bedroom to threaten her into letting Ginevra stay with them _for Ginevra_, did she? Honestly. Whatever it was making her uncomfortable, she was obviously reasoning her way past it somehow, her face gradually clearing. "Okay, well...it shouldn't be a problem then?" It did sound more like a question than anything.

"It wouldn't be, if it were almost anything else. You _know_ I'm not normal, Maïa. I don't... The whole...dating thing, I don't really _get_ it. I mean, I sort of get the courtship thing the nobility do, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that's not what we're talking about here."

Maïa's face went very red again.

"It's just... From what I understand, it's one of those, interpersonal..._feelings_, things, and I don't really _do_ feelings. I don't understand romance, and squishy stuff like that, I just don't, and I never will. So, I will _inevitably_ fuck up. I'm going to do something wrong, or say something wrong, and I don't _want_ to fuck it up, because, well, I _did_ start spending so much time around you for a reason. I'm just...concerned this will end very, _very_ badly."

She was sort of violating the _plain, brutal honesty_ claim there — she didn't really _feel_ concern, not the way other people did. But, sometimes she had to fudge the language to get her point across, there wasn't really anything she could do about that. English wasn't designed to be used by people like her...and speaking thunderbird in the middle of a park in muggle France would probably draw unwanted attention.

"I mean, I'm _not_ saying no — as I said, I'm perfectly willing to give you what you want, and I _do_ like you. I just... I can't help what I am, Maïa. And I can't help but think I'm going to be _really_ bad at the...dating, normal-person-romance...thing."

"Yes, well." For some inexplicable reason, Maïa looked...amused? That was...odd. Lyra officially had no clue what was going on anymore. "I did sort of guess that already."

"Er. What?"

"Honestly, Lyra, how long have we known each other now? I'm not under any illusions that—" The corner of her lips twitched. "—you could do _squishy feelings_, or _the_ _normal-person-romance thing_."

...Okay, now she was confused.

And Maïa just seemed to think her confusion was bloody _funny_, sitting there smirking at her. "I started to spend so much time with you for a reason too, you know. If I _wanted_ normal, don't you think I would have asked someone else?"

Lyra blinked. "Good point. So, er... Okay, then?"

"Okay, then."

"Right. Now that we have _that_ straightened out..."

Maïa had barely long enough to properly frown in confusion before Lyra was snogging her.

Gods and Powers, that little yelp was _adorable_.

* * *

[or Cambrian or simply British, some mages avoided using the word "Welsh"] — _The word Wales/Welsh is ultimately descended from the name the Romans used for a Gaulish tribal confederation. The term eventually expanded to be applied to various peoples all across the Western Empire who, well, weren't Roman. Similar to the original Greek use of barbarian, really. Modern Welsh nationalists actually consider the term "Welsh" itself to be...not quite a slur, exactly, but certainly insensitive. I imagine the more Celtic-centered magical government would have used native names or Cambria (a Latin interpretation of a native name). Of course, speaking English, Lyra will use Wales/Welsh because she just considers it the proper English word — or _gallois_, since they're speaking French at the moment, but that has the same issues attached to it — but Hermione would be more aware of the disagreement around it._

_Yes, Emma Granger is going to have a position of influence in the magical government, and Lyra and Hermione are "a thing" now. Britain is doomed._

_—Lysandra_


	12. What exactly makes this a date?

Hermione jumped at the sound of the doorbell, fought to suppress the immediate flare of nervousness. Taking a last breath in isolation, she set her book aside and stood up, quick tugged at her skirt to make sure her dress was sitting straight, and headed for the front door.

She wasn't entirely surprised Mum got there first, pulling open the door even as Hermione made it to the entryway. "Hello again, Lyra." Mum's greeting sounded oddly amused.

"Emma." Lyra still used the cool, polite pureblood voice with Mum, though she'd switched to using her first name at some point, Hermione wasn't sure when or why. She stepped inside a moment later, in a vest and skirt that would pass for muggle, thankfully — Hermione had suggested as much, but Lyra had a rather eccentric impression of what passed for an ordinary outfit for a muggle teenager. Her boots were familiar, the same mage-made knee-high leather ones she wore most days at school, but they were mundane-looking enough nobody should notice.

It _could_ be her imagination, but Hermione thought Lyra might have put rather more effort into her appearance than usual. Her hair looked slightly shinier than it naturally did, suggesting some kind of charm, little plaits framing her face she normally didn't bother with, a large white-silver pin stuck through on top, Hermione couldn't quite make out the design from this angle. (Her jewelry was more understated in general than she sometimes wore at school, apparently realising the magical nobility's style was quite gaudy by muggle standards — her simple earrings and that big hair pin were probably real silver, but at least Hermione didn't see any gemstones anywhere.) It was _very_ subtle, but she suspected Lyra's face was under rather more cosmetic charms than normal. Nothing so over the top as Lavender and her insipid friends used, it was honestly hard to tell for sure at all, she just seemed...cleaner and, well, prettier than normal. _Slightly_, if Hermione didn't spend so much time around her she probably wouldn't have noticed at all.

Also, for some reason, she was carrying in her arms a rather sizeable ceramic pot, filled with— "Lyra, what the hell."

Lyra blinked at her for a second, staring back over the purple flowers spilling out of the pot. "Er, did I do something wrong already? That didn't take very long..."

(Mum, looking _very_ amused, quietly took her leave, disappearing in the direction of the kitchen.)

"No, it's not _that_, just— What's with the flower pot?"

"Oh, I was under the impression you were owed an apology for not inviting you to the World Cup. Which, okay, honestly it hadn't occurred to me, you obviously don't think much of quidditch and all the interesting stuff was politics, which you also don't care about, but."

Perfectly reasonable, she guessed — she wasn't actually wrong, about the quidditch and the politics. It wasn't really about that. It'd been becoming increasingly clear to her lately that she actually knew very little magical Britain, especially where...well, where the nobility _wasn't_ concerned, the ordinary mages who weren't invited to Hogwarts. (Apparently Hogwarts mostly took the nobility and muggleborns, which was a weird combination, some old treaty obligation or something.) And then there were the _thousands_ of guests from _dozens_ of nations all over the world... If she _had_ gone, the most interesting part of the whole thing probably would have been just wandering around the site taking in...well, everything.

If she _were_ going to be annoyed about anything, it would be that it "honestly hadn't occurred" to Lyra to invite her, but by now she'd learned Lyra couldn't really help that sort of thing much of the time. There was no use fretting over it.

But that didn't entirely answer the question. "Okay, and...?"

"And according to Zee, apologies for minor slips like that often take the form of flowers and/or chocolates. I've hardly ever seen you eat chocolate at all, so." Lyra shrugged, the leaves and blossoms of her entirely unnecessary apology gift rustling a bit with the motion.

Despite herself, Hermione felt a reluctant smile pulling at her lips. Honestly, Lyra was just so _silly_ sometimes. "So, Ms. Zabini didn't explain she meant _cut_ flowers, not living potted plants."

Lyra's face scrunched in a confused frown. "Really? That seems...weirdly morbid. I mean, not that I'm not one to judge about being weirdly morbid, but..."

_That_ was an odd thing to say, probably a magical culture thing. "Right, well." Hermione shuffled a little closer, slipping her arms around the pot. Lyra let go as soon as she had it, rolling her shoulders and shaking her wrists out a bit — not surprising, she'd probably been carrying it a while and it was sort of heavy. "I do appreciate the effort, but you really didn't have to. And I don't mean that in the humble, self-effacing way — for future reference, things like random gifts of flowers _and/or_ chocolates are completely unnecessary. Sweet, yes, but, well—" Hermione couldn't quite help a little smirk. "—don't strain yourself, you know."

She still wasn't entirely certain what she expected from this whole...dating thing, but she _did_ know she hadn't been expecting _flowers and/or chocolates_. After all, she _had_ known what she was getting into when she'd asked out _Lyra bloody Black_. If silly inanities like _flowers and/or chocolates_ were what she wanted, she wouldn't have bothered.

(Not that she was certain what she _did_ want, but at least she knew it wasn't that.)

"Right, okay, good to know." Then she grinned, her charmed purple eyes almost sparkling. "Hi, by the way."

Hermione laughed. "Hi. Come on, let me set this down." She wavered for a moment on exactly _where_ to put it, before deciding the kitchen would be best. (It had the most consistent sunlight of anywhere in the house, and the easiest access to water.) The downside was her parents would be in there right now, but that damage had already been done.

"So, where are we going, anyway? I assume somewhere muggle, but you didn't say anything more than that."

Both her parents were, indeed, in the kitchen, Mum sitting at the table with the paper and a cup of tea, Dad at the hob partway through frying something for dinner — Hermione hadn't bothered asking what, since she wouldn't be home anyway. "I thought we'd wander around Oxford for a bit," she said, setting the pot down on the counter, near the back window. "There are a couple museums down there, and we'd stop somewhere for dinner at some point, obviously." Hermione wasn't really clear on what people did on dates, exactly, but that seemed...reasonable.

Lyra made a face. "Museums like art museums? I mean, that's fine, I just don't really..._get_ art, is all. Especially static art."

To be entirely honest, Hermione didn't either. Plenty of art _looked pretty_, she guessed, but it wasn't what she'd rather do with her eyes — she'd actually snuck a book on a daytrip in primary to an art museum so she could read instead. "I was thinking the Museum of Natural History, actually, and Pitt Rivers." Had the bonus of introducing Lyra to a fair bit of muggle science and history and culture she likely knew nothing about, and she was enough of a total nerd that she'd probably find it legitimately interesting.

"I have no idea what those are, but okay."

Mum cleared her throat, drawing their attention to her. "Check the time, Hermione."

What? Hermione frowned, glanced toward the microwave. "...Crap." She'd originally considered what exactly they would do on a date with the thought that they'd be going out around lunchtime, but Lyra was still spending most of her time in California, lunchtime was a bit _early_ for her — plus political stuff going on, but Hermione knew little about that — so something in the evening had been more convenient for her. Hermione had, somehow, failed to take the change in schedule into account.

"Er...?"

"The Museum closed at five. I completely forgot."

"Oh, well..." Lyra trailed off, shrugged. "We can always go to Charing. There are still some interesting spots down Knockturn and Cinia we haven't been to yet."

"Yeah, but we'd have to get aging potions for that." Which wasn't _necessarily_ a problem, Hermione would just need to change quick. Adding ten years to her age made her bra _very_ uncomfortable, but it was manageable, she just needed a moment alone to resize the thing or arrange her outfit so she needn't wear one at all. She did have some practice now, with how much they'd snuck out to London over the last year.

"Cherri could grab those for me in, like, five seconds."

"Why do you need aging potions to go anywhere?" Dad asked, shooting them a suspicious look over his shoulder. "I mean, I'm assuming aging potions are what they sound like."

There was another thing Lyra probably shouldn't have said in front of her parents — not that Hermione was really keeping track anymore, it didn't actually seem to matter much. Mum, for her own inscrutable reasons, had clearly decided to latch onto the Blacks, and while Dad was more obviously dubious he'd decided to go along with it. Less enthusiastically, but they were both on board — largely so they could have _some_ say on what went on in the magical world, which was an unsettling thought, Mum took over _everything_ — so what was done was done. "Nothing like that, Knockturn is just, sort of, the bad part of town. Not, _really_ dangerous or anything, we just had one close scrape with a hag once and Lyra took care of that fine."

Lyra nodded. "Knockturn isn't nearly as bad as its reputation, but the natives _might_ try something if you look like an easy target. Just looking and acting like you belong there is usually enough, but not looking our age is a simple shortcut. I've been there more times than I can count and never had any trouble. Honestly, I was skipping around the place when I was _seven_ and I was fine, but nobody's going to mess with me no matter how young I look. House of Black, and all that. The aging potions are just for Maïa's benefit."

At first, Hermione was just relieved Lyra seemed to realise they were trying to reassure her parents, wouldn't normally give her that much credit to go along with it. But then she was distracted by the rest — was that true? She'd assumed the aging potions were, just, part of Lyra's normal routine going to Charing, but it'd been to protect Hermione the whole time?

Huh. That was...weirdly responsible of her. Hermione wasn't sure what to think about that.

"Ooh, or we could go check out...whatever this magical settlement in the Bay Area is called, I've heard conflicting names. The magical culture in that area of California is a weird combination of Chinese and American influences, with some more recent borrowings from the West, it's fascinating. I haven't looked around near as much as I would have, been too busy. Other than getting my new wand, anyway, but I went all the way to the Lakes for that."

Okay, Hermione could temporarily overlook the suggestion that they, just, casually go to the opposite end of the world on their date to ask after that little aside. "You went to an American wandcrafter to get your new wand? Do American mages even _use_ wands?" She'd been under the impression indigenous American solely used witchcraft. They were _good_ at it, obviously — some of their wardcrafting was good enough mages from the Old World never did manage to crack them — but wands were generally considered a very eastern hemisphere thing. Pretty much everyone from Ireland to Singapore used them now, but...

"Well, sure, Americans use wands. Not natively, obviously, but they've adapted them in the centuries since contact. Partially, at least, they still practise their old stuff for things wizardry isn't really suited for." Lyra pulled her wand out of nothing — now that Hermione was paying attention, she saw it clearly wasn't the same one, the wood lighter, not quite as symmetrical or smoothly-polished as Ollivander's work, little spirals carved into the surface in a pattern Hermione couldn't make out from here. "Hornbeam and thunderbird," she said, wiggling the wand. "I met the thunderbird the feather came from, actually. And apparently I _am_ an omniglot, because the thunderbird magic language thing completely ignored my occlumency and I accidentally copied the whole language in, like, ten seconds."

"You..._speak thunderbird_." As Hermione understood it, thunderbirds were, sort of, an American phoenix. They had nothing to do with fire at all, of course, but they were highly magical, long-lived birds with being-level intelligence — phoenixes and thunderbirds were, in fact, the only known beings with a totally non-humanoid body plan (unless they were counting acromantulae, which most people didn't) — and had a long history of interaction with human society, featuring prominently in early magical traditions and even religion, much as phoenixes had in Egypt and the Far East.

While both phoenixes and thunderbirds were generally understood to be at least as intelligent as humans (some writers even claimed they were _more_ intelligent), communicating with them could be...difficult. They clearly couldn't use human languages, they simply hadn't the biology to pull it off. Some learned to cast illusions to "speak" that way, but few bothered. Instead, phoenixes...sort of _projected_ feelings and images and impressions through the ambient magic around them, the meaning absorbed directly into people's heads through contact. Which was, just, bloody _strange_, but magic could be like that sometimes.

The point was, thunderbirds communicated more through _magic_ than language. Hermione hadn't realised omniglottalism worked like that.

But apparently it did, because Lyra smirked at her, and then she was _singing_, a nonsense smattering of empty vowels, light and quick. And while Hermione suspected the "words" didn't actually mean anything, she still _understood_, somehow. Not that it was necessarily very clear — she saw (faintly, in her mind's eye) a little pond, clear and shimmering, a bird fluttering toward her over the surface (its exact shape didn't come through very well, just a blob of blue and black feathers), a sense of giddy fascination, its magic was _pretty_, sharp and intense and _wild_, and then a moment of dizzy nausea, then a white-hot migraine, suddenly feeling too _full_, and a sense of chagrin, apparently she did have the language thing, how could she not have known that, and—

The echo faded, and Lyra was standing in the kitchen, looking all too pleased with herself. All too pleased, because she'd gotten quite a reaction, Hermione and her parents all just blankly staring at her. (Apparently it worked on muggles too, despite them not being able to channel magic, which was interesting.) After a few seconds, Hermione found her voice again. "I had _no idea_ humans could even learn to _speak thunderbird_."

Lyra shrugged. "Yes, well, omniglots are cheaters. Though, magical languages cause a weird sort of feedback loop — it's supposed to take a couple weeks at least to get all the way fluent, but my magic getting into their magic makes strange things happen. I get the magical part of it too...somehow. The same thing happened with Harry and Parseltongue earlier this month, and it made me an actual Parselmouth, can talk to snakes and everything, which people like Luna who just learned the language can't do. It's neat."

"...Okay, that's just _fascinating_. Isn't omniglottalism mediated through mind magic? Because, I thought Parseltongue was blood magic, it's hereditary. You could probably design a blood alchemy ritual to _make_ someone a Parselmouth — you'd need the blood of a Parselmouth on hand, but it shouldn't be difficult — but is it even _possible_ to just copy it with mind magic?"

"I don't know any better than you, Maïa. I thought it was impossible too. The thunderbird one could maybe be explained, since it's obviously some kind of mind or soul magic or something, but the Parseltongue, yeah, I got nothing."

"I would say we could look into it, but has anyone modeled how omniglottalism works?"

"Not really, no. Translation charms and such were developed out of experiments to try to figure it out, but they never actually did. Oh, hey! It _might_ be possible to instantly give magical languages to people who _aren't_ omniglots, if you inverted the determiners in a translation charm. And if the target was an omniglot who spoke the magical language in question, obviously. The intent to enforce comprehension _might_ trigger that weird feedback loop thing — I'm pretty sure that's why it happens, the intent to _enforce_ comprehension running into the intent to _acquire_ comprehension, feeding into each other."

"Well, that's certainly possible, assuming none of the operators cancel out — which, since neither omnigottalism _or_ Parseltongue and whatever thunderbirds do have been fully modeled, there would be no way of knowing until we, just, tried it. And I'm not really sure if it's a good idea to go experimenting with mind-mediated magics to induce interactions that haven't been modeled, that sounds like it could go _very_ badly. Er, not to mention, if it's targeting _you_, your ridiculous instinctive occlumency would block it."

"I'm sure I could talk Eris into relaxing it long enough, in service of spreading magical languages around. Especially if it's just with you, to see if we can get it to work, she likes you."

"Er..."

"I already did half the work on the translation charm at Zee's wedding, to help Harry speak French—"

"What? How did you pull _that_ off?"

"Inverted a translation charm to get it to draw information from a third party, it was _neat_. Anyway, we'd just need to isolate the source referent string and flip it, then rebalance the rest of the charm so it will stay inverted. It'll be a bit more tricky than the arithmancy I did over _antipasti_, but I already did half the work."

"You did the arithmancy to invert a translation charm...at the dinner table...at Ms. Zabini's wedding reception."

"Sure. Don't lie, I _know_ you would rather play with neat magic than suffer small talk."

"Well, okay, you're probably right about that, I was just thinking, if we set a downtap to draw away the interference, we could maybe prevent anything going _catastrophically_ wrong, but it would have to be tuned to _mind_ magic, and I'm not sure how we would—"

"Girls?" Hermione jumped at her mum's voice — she'd somehow forgotten her parents were there. Both of them were watching them with rather wary expressions, Dad somewhat more distracted by his cooking, Mum with an obvious shade of amusement. "Were you planning on actually leaving on your date at some point, or are you just going to stand in the kitchen talking magic theory all night?"

Hermione's face abruptly felt _very_ warm.

* * *

It didn't take Hermione very long to realise she had absolutely no idea what she was doing.

In the end, they did decide to go the _opposite end of the planet on a date_. Which, sure, _sounded_ absurd, but exactly how the laws around international travel worked got very complicated once magic was involved. (Hermione _had_ brought her papers just in case, but that was probably just paranoia.) Getting there was shockingly quick and simple, considering it was literally _fourteen thousand kilometres_, but magic was absurd like that.

The first step, Lyra side-alonged her — apparently Lyra had keyed herself through their anti-apparation wards, which Hermione hadn't realised but wasn't surprised by — straight to the portal room at Ancient House. Hermione had been to Ancient House, the oldest property of the House of Black on the Islands and long the heart of their family, a fair few times by now, though she'd only ever been to the portal room and the library (along with the neighbouring bedrooms and parlours where Cherri had stashed the rest of the Black collection that didn't fit in the one room). The portal room itself was simple and empty, granite tiles and wood panels, distinguished only by the metallic runes embedded into the walls and, much more recently, by sheets of silk hung like tapestries, glimmering with inlaid metal threads silver and gold.

Hermione _still_ wasn't sure how the hell Lyra had gotten these things to work. She had gone over the modifications Lyra had made to the script — portals usually had to be anchored to the local ambient magic, but Lyra had gotten around that somehow, her mobile portals essentially floating on...an inverted dispersal ward? like the one she'd put around Hermione's house to fool the Ministry's magic sensors? Except, instead of neutralising the magic in the area and dispersing it into the surrounding ambient magic, it instead _gathered_ ambient magic, and neutralised it into something the portal enchantment could use...she thought? maybe? Comparatively speaking, no matter how esoteric and novel it was, Hermione understood exploiting alchemy to tweak the balance of the enchantment and stop the sheets from bursting into flames far better — she couldn't actually do any alchemy herself, but it wasn't that conceptually strange. The enchanting work, on the other hand, _that_ was ridiculous.

Especially ridiculous because Hermione hadn't even realised Lyra had been working on it at all, she'd just pulled a completed portal out of her pocket to move their little illicit library to Ancient House early in the spring, with absolutely no fanfare. She'd given Hermione her notes on it, but with how casual she was... Hermione wasn't certain she realised just how impressive these things were. She could probably use it as a Mastery project, she'd just have to write it up into something she could submit, and find some panel somewhere that would actually take her seriously.

It was still strange to think that Lyra could just go out and get what was essentially the equivalent of a postgraduate science degree if she felt like it.

Hermione was working on it, though! Since this sort of thing was Lyra's particular area of expertise, they did end up talking about runic magic rather a lot, and she _had_ gotten a fair bit of practice in lately. Significant portions of the Black library were cursed — for some reason, Lyra never had given a reasonable explanation for that. Lyra had taught her the detection charms to figure out what was cursed and a couple analysis charms to determine what kind of curse it was (some only affected muggles, after all, so could safely be ignored), and she would often break curses for her if she asked and the book (or the curse) seemed interesting enough, sometimes she _wouldn't_, either uninterested in that particular book or distracted by one of the who knew how many projects she had going at all times. Hermione had read up a bit on basic cursebreaking over the last year — it _was_ a NEWT topic, but Lyra had been demonstrating on the regular since September just how useful a skill it could be, so she'd been looking into it — and she had gotten to a point she could analyse complex enchantments and crack simple curses on her own.

She was pretty good at it, actually.

She'd been concerned, before, that so much of magical skill seemed to be based on performative talent, the speed and grace and precision of direct spellwork. And while Hermione was _good_ at that sort of thing, she wasn't _great_ at it — her only significant advantage was in being able to learn a _lot_ of spells quickly, and actually understanding the theory behind them, but sometimes that just wasn't enough. She was well aware that Harry proved himself the better spellcaster every time he actually put effort into it, and he hardly even seemed to know what he was doing when he did, he just..._did it_. (Which was _so_ not fair, Hermione actually had to _work_ to get results like that, talented lucky bastard.) Hermione was well aware that, when it came to wizardry, she was mediocre, and would fall behind quickly as her peers further developed.

But _witchcraft?_ Hermione was starting to realise _that_ was a completely different story. It was becoming quite clear that the more methodical, cerebral sort of magic was just were her talents lay. The logic behind witchcraft could be fuzzy and..._poetic_ at times, but that made perfect sense — the meaning was defined and the intent directed by the human mind, and anyone who'd studied anything about psychology at all realised consciousness was a tangled mess of associations and biases conscious and unconscious all wrapped up in each other. It only made sense magic that exploited human language and human action would be just as symbolic and metaphorical as the human experience itself.

Potions were peculiar looked at too literally, seeming random and just surreal at times, but there was a metaphorical sort of logic to it, one that could be decoded with a little bit of thought. Ritual, though she'd only read about them so far, seemed much the same, just on a larger scale. (Lyra had once pointed out that potions were essentially just a special class of low ritual, and everything had suddenly made a whole lot more sense.)

Piecing together bits of symbolic meaning to pick apart how an enchantment operated, or even designing new ones of her own? Once she understood the mechanics of how it worked, it was _easy_. No more complicated than learning a new language, really. In a way, warding and enchanting (and cursebreaking) were rather like an odd combination of maths, poetry, and just holding a conversation, once she understood the symbols and the patterns the basics of how it worked had fallen right into place.

Which wasn't to say she was _nearly_ as good at it as Lyra was. Lyra had _far_ more experience with this stuff than she did, had intuition developed from repetition for things Hermione was still learning for the first time. But she was learning, and learning _quickly_. If nothing else, spending so much time around Lyra was going to turn her into one hell of an enchantress, whether she wanted to be or not.

(And she _did_ want to, runic magic was bloody _fascinating_.)

But that she didn't entirely understand how these bloody portals worked didn't mean she couldn't use them just fine. A moment to find the one with a little slip of paper reading "_America — Zee's flat"_ pinned to it, a quick charm to activate the script and a few seconds to wait for it to charge, and she was walking through a swirl of colour and motion, and she was in California. Because magic was just neat like that.

On the way out of the spacious, luxurious flat, they bumped into both Harry and Sirius Black, which were both awkward for their own reasons. Harry was _clearly_ quite uncomfortable with the fact that she and Lyra were dating now — which was hypocritical of him, what with..._whatever_ was going on with _Blaise sodding Zabini_, he had no right to talk — and while he didn't actually say anything about it, he kept giving them strange, uneasy looks. Sirius Black was equally terrible, but not because he clearly disapproved and was trying to keep his mouth shut about it, no, if anything the loud, flamboyant man seemed to think it was _hilarious_, just joking and teasing, a brilliant grin on his face that looked eerily familiar (apparently it was just a Black thing), an eager light in his eyes, as though Lyra Black and Hermione Granger going out on a date made his bloody day.

(Did he know, about where Lyra had come from? It _would_ explain some of the subtext, and he called her _Bella_...)

Which was, just, _offensive_ — she didn't _at all_ like the suggestion that the two of them together was something to laugh about — Hermione had to fight to hold her tongue. She had never met Sirius Black before, not really, and it probably wouldn't make a great first impression to yell at him for being...such a _dick_. Not that he was making a good impression either, but... Well, what with the vassalage thing, she was unsettlingly aware of the fact that Sirius was technically kind of sort of her Lord now (or would be soon, anyway), and he probably couldn't help it, she was certain a decade in Azkaban must have exacerbated his baseline Black insanity, he was Harry's godfather (which was a _huge_ deal in magical culture, Sirius was essentially his father now), and he was practically the only family that Harry _or_ Lyra had (save for her sisters, but that was complicated), and it was just...

Uncomfortable, it was _seriously_ bloody uncomfortable. As far as she was concerned, they could _not_ get out of there quickly enough.

Thankfully, Lyra didn't seem to appreciate it either. Which, that was somewhat reassuring, that Lyra didn't think it was something to joke around about. If not for the same reasons — she seemed more confused and exasperated than anything — but it was something, at least.

And then they just...walked around the nearby magical settlement. Not that that was a _bad_ thing, certainly not — Hermione realised her exposure to the magical world in general was still rather minimal, and she knew almost nothing about the Americans at all. Well, she knew the Federation, the equivalent to the ICW over here, sponsored Miskatonic in a relationship very similar to the Ministry and the Department of Mysteries, but she knew very little about the magical nations over here, she meant. Not that very many people in Europe were _that_ familiar with the Americans — there had been an enormous and seriously bloody war to force the natives to comply with the Statute of Secrecy back in the 17th Century, and to this day many people over here were still deeply bitter about it.

The American Federation was, in fact, openly anti-Statutarian. It made any dealings with the Americans in an official capacity..._complicated_.

She hadn't really known what to expect, but the bustling magical town Lyra brought her to still came as a surprise. It was just... If she had to guess, she had an unconscious assumption that it would seem...well, Western. After all, before she'd known about magic, "America" to her had meant the United States and all the other modern countries over here, all of which had either been extensively colonised or directly founded by Europeans (or both) — as much as some Americans might like to claim some unique identity, the culture over here had always struck her as inextricably European in character. Canadians were sometimes very English (or French), Americans, in the sense of people from the United States, felt very German to her, though with more than a bit of stereotypical French self-righteousness, the rest of the continent had a lot of Spain or Greece or even Ireland in them (which was odd, she couldn't put her finger on why she got that impression). The details might vary, but it was all very familiar in the broad strokes, like the same furniture painted in slightly different colours.

This, however, was _completely_ unfamiliar.

For one thing, it was very green. The town seemed to be somewhat more spread out than Hermione was used to, buildings marked off by twisting rivers of trees and plants of all shapes and sizes, occasionally split with a narrow band of fresh water gently flowing toward the bay. Hermione had been baffled at first, but eventually realised these bands of green were mostly composed of edible plants, vegetables and grains and fruits — they were gardens, in the less modern suburban sense of the word, the town apparently grew their own food _inside_ the town itself. Which...she _supposed_ that would be more efficient, if they had the space for it. If nothing else, they didn't have to worry about transportation and storage and such nearly as much.

Reflexively, Hermione started picking over the logistical problems such a strategy might present, before realising most of them would be trivial to solve with magic on hand. Obviously.

There were denser spots, of course, markets and larger housing blocks, these areas of the town much more colourful, a rainbow of paints and ceramics, beaded curtains blowing in the breeze off the sea. There were hints of Far Eastern influence here and there — most obviously, Hermione noticed Chinese signage in a few places, but some of the decoration also felt vaguely Asian, in a way subtle enough she couldn't quite put her finger on what gave her that impression — but the overbearing feeling was one completely foreign. The architecture was rather...odd, much more open than she would expect, with a lot of curving lines and foyers and seating areas unenclosed by solid walls. The market especially, everything from sizeable, professional-looking shops to scrappy little booths, most only had three walls (only two at the corners), some didn't even have _ceilings_ — the ones that did usually had another shop, just, perched on top of it, which, the building materials were rather flimsy-looking wood, in some case the thin ceilings held up with a handful of simple stakes, leaving the whole haphazard structure looking _very_ precarious, there had to be all kinds of enchantments on these things just holding it up.

It looked _very_ dangerous to the muggle eye, like a stiff breeze would bring the whole thing crumbling under its own weight, but it certainly _felt_ sturdy enough. They dropped in on a bookstore in one of these market blocks — Hermione only half-understood Lyra asking for directions, apparently she'd picked up some Spanish over the summer — which had required going up two flights of stairs, then picking through a couple halls to find the place, deep in the middle of the thing. (It seemed the building had accumulated store by store, the lower down and closer to the centre the older it was.) They had left little hallways between the places, and those were...interesting. There were drawings and such all over the walls, some of which looked orderly enough to be official but much of it was _obviously_ graffiti, bushes and vines and flowers occasionally sprouting here and there — those _had_ to be placed intentionally and with some magical tricks, there simply wasn't room for their roots — _something_ worked into the ceiling that glowed a mild, pleasant blue, illuminating things will enough in the absence of sunlight, but softly, nowhere glaring.

The bookstore itself was very pretty — the bare wood of the structure and the shelves and such coated in layers of cloth in moody blacks and reds, the soft blue light just intense enough to comfortably read without straining the eyes, a soft sort of calm she only found in her parents' library or their dorm after Lyra had split off their half — but something of a disappointment, in the end. See, it was surprisingly large, they had quite a lot of books spread across dozens and dozens of shelves, but very, very few of them were in languages she could read. Most of them, Hermione couldn't even read the _script_ they were in. The greatest fraction of their selection were in a smattering of native languages, their written form _completely_ new to her, or in Chinese; a smaller section were written in the alphabet she was most familiar with, a roughly even mix of English and Spanish, with a small smattering of French and German and Latin.

When she thought about it, this did make sense. The Europeans and the Asians had worked together to coerce the Americans into accepting the Statute, the former operating out of the east coast and the latter the west — there were enclaves of significant European influence in New England, but they'd never gotten as far as California. As part of the deal made at the end of the war, the Americans retained control over their lands and their people, but they _did_ remain open to refugees from both the West and the East, mages who for whatever reason would rather make a new life for themselves in a foreign land than remain in their home countries. (Miskatonic was the most infamous example, originally founded by European mages who'd defected to the Americans during the war.) So, unlike on the muggle side, native culture was still dominant, hence the completely unfamiliar writing, but there _would_ be a large Asian minority in the west, hence the Chinese characters. Obviously, the vast majority of their muggleborns these days would be English or Spanish speakers, so they had _some_ books in these languages, but true muggleborns were a very small percentage of the magical population, and in this environment it only made sense they would have to learn the local tongue if they wanted to integrate, so they had little need to keep books in English around.

Hermione was quite grateful magical Britain actually spoke English — it hadn't occurred to her until just now, but that hadn't necessarily been a given. Most of the British purebloods were descendants of old Celtic clans that had lived on the islands since long before the Germanic tribes that had eventually become the English had arrived, and she knew from History class they had been slower to adopt the new language and customs than muggle history suggested. Hell, the official language, the one used in the Wizengamot and the Ministry, had been...not the Welsh she knew but a language closely related to it all the way up until _1764_, when they'd finally adopted English. Many mages _still_ spoke Welsh and Irish at home, they just used English as the common language. With how bloody stubborn purebloods were, she really was quite fortunate she hadn't had to learn a new language on top of everything else.

In the end, Hermione _did_ buy something, an overview of American warding techniques that was actually in English. But it was still rather disappointing.

Now, they were sitting in a restaurant of some kind. It wasn't quite the sort of thing Hermione was familiar with — it was sort of a buffet thing, she guessed? Though that wasn't quite right. They were outside (right in front of a sizeable building, where she assumed they would retreat if it weren't quite so nice at the moment), seated at a large, curving table, surrounded by Americans. They didn't order food — which was fortunate, since it was altogether likely Hermione and the servers wouldn't share a language — but just wandered over to a nearby (open-air) kitchen, a couple tables, raw fruits and vegetables and a variety of dishes that were largely unfamiliar laid out waiting. Patrons _could_ make requests directly of the cooks, apparently, but they didn't appear to speak English, so Hermione hadn't bothered. Lyra did ask a few questions for both of them, awkwardly poking at the native language, just asking what things _were_.

It wasn't a bad place, exactly. She meant, it was sort of noisy, but the food was fine, foreign but flavourful and interesting. (The drink Lyra had ended up pouring for her after a brief discussion was _very_ good, sharp and tangy with a subtle hint of honey, but she also suspected it was alcoholic, so she was trying not to have too much.) And, well, _yes_, noisy, with people pressing in on all sides, but they weren't getting _too_ close, at least, and Lyra had cast a paling to cut it down a bit.

She didn't silence them entirely, though — as they sat eating and talking, Lyra would occasionally trail off, staring off toward one conversation or another. As Hermione understood it, she was _trying_ to relax her god-given occlumency so she could properly pick up languages. She'd been born an omniglot, but... Hermione _would_ say it was unfortunate that what Eris had done to her head blocked it off, but she was certain Lyra valued being immune to the imperius more than not having to struggle to cheat at languages. Whatever she was trying was a new trick, reverse-engineering what Harry had down to accidentally give her Parseltongue, and she still wasn't very good at it yet. Hence getting distracted.

(Omniglottalism really was quite fascinating, when she thought about it. Apparently, if it were working properly, Lyra _should_ be slowly absorbing the local language just by _sitting nearby_ while it was being used. That was just... How did that _work_, even?)

It was in one of these silences, Lyra blankly staring at strangers, that Hermione realised she had absolutely no idea what she was doing.

She'd thought she was, before...sort of. But she was starting to wonder if she understood what she wanted, what other people meant with this sort of thing, nearly as well as she thought they had. She meant...what was different about today than...any other time they'd... They'd run off to Hogsmeade and London several times, and...

What exactly made this a date?

Not that she... She meant, she wasn't disappointed, or annoyed, or anything, she just... She was just confused, she guessed. She'd thought she'd feel different, or that it would be different, and...when she thought about it, that was a kind of silly assumption. It wasn't like she'd expected Lyra to be particularly..._romantic_, or whatever, and to be completely honest Hermione didn't think she'd know what to do with herself if she were.

She didn't think she'd known what she was getting into, when she'd decided they were dating now. She'd thought things would be different, and...well, really, she didn't know why. Why should things change much at all?

Honestly, she wasn't sure she wanted it to. She liked their relationship the way it was, for the most part — Lyra could be a bit more forthcoming about things, but she'd been getting gradually better about that for a while now, it was a work in progress.

Hermione was starting to think that she was just...weird. Like, sitting here watching Lyra stare into space attempting to magically absorb a new language, she was getting the strange feeling that... Well, she thought that if she had a choice between, like, the normal person romance...whatever, that kind of relationship, or someone who was brilliant and interesting that she could talk about and experiment with magic with, and occasionally snog when she felt like, she'd probably pick the latter. And she didn't know how to feel about that.

She remembered how it'd felt, that day, when she'd just out and kissed Lyra, because _she'd written a book for her_, and... She didn't think that was an entirely normal thing to be, like, _this person is absolutely beautiful and I need to be kissing them right now_, that was just sort of strange. And, honestly, _most_ of the times she got random...er, affectionate urges, she guessed was a way to say it, most of the time she felt like that was because Lyra had just said or done something completely brilliant, and...

Well, Hermione was quickly coming to the conclusion that she had no idea what she was doing, and that she was a very, very strange person. But she was okay with that. Mostly.

Lyra had been out of it for a while this time, so Hermione (forcing down a sudden flare of awkwardness, because _stop it_) reached under the table, found Lyra's hand in her lap, slipped her fingers through hers. Lyra started slightly, turned to blink at her. "Yeah?"

"I suppose the cheating at languages isn't going well? You checked out for a while there."

"Oh, er, no, not really." For a second, Lyra stared at her, eyes slightly narrowed, apparently considering something. Then she shrugged, turning back to her food — and pointedly not extricating her hand from Hermione's. (At least, Hermione felt it was pointed, but she could be imagining...whatever she even thought she meant by that.) "It hasn't been going so well in general, because Eris doesn't do anything by halves and mind magic is hard, but it doesn't help that American languages are also just..._really_ bloody weird. I mean, they just... Verbs. That's all I have to say on the matter, _verbs_."

Hermione felt her lips twitch. "Maybe starting with something more familiar would have been easier."

"Well, maybe, but if it were _too_ familiar I might not even notice it happening, and that's not helpful at all. Though I suppose it couldn't go too badly — it's not like I can catastrophically fuck it up and make myself _intangible_, or anything like that."

"How did that even happen, anyway? I mean, I doubt you were trying to do that on purpose."

"No, I wasn't trying to— Well, I guess that's debatable, actually, I don't know if the obscurity thing would _also_ make me intangible or not. But anyway, it's this thing Eris does, to make herself imperceptible while manifesting on this plane...which, now that I think about it, is really weird — you'd think she could, just, _un_-manifest and project her voice and then _re_-manifest...but apparently that hadn't even occurred to her? Which is kind of weird, but okay. Oh, wait, that was sarcasm."

"Focus, Lyra. This is a shadow magic thing, right?"

"Yeah, isn't that obvious? I...did give you that treatise Other Bella did on shadow magic, right, that's general enough I think you can extrapolate most of the principles."

"I never did get all the way through that. Oh, don't give me that look — you handed it over in the middle of exam season, I was busy!" Which was only half the reason she'd put it off. It was just... It was one thing, reading the results of experiments that never should have been done in the Arthra because, well, whether she read about them or not would have absolutely no impact on whether researchers at Miskatonic continued their work. (And the vast majority of the research they did wasn't _nearly_ as bad as British propaganda suggested, anyway.) It was quite another to realise that you were starting to think of one of the most violent war criminals in modern history as a respectable, academic-minded magical theorist.

"You didn't _need_ to be busy, you could have not revised at all and you would have gotten Os in everything."

"That isn't the point."

"Because I'm totally right, and you know it."

"Shut up, Lyra. But anyway, do you think there's anything available on the topic that's not so...dense? I mean, I doubt I'll ever be able to shadow-walk myself, but there's enchanting you can do with shadow magic, and at the very least I'll be able to understand what's going on when you talk about it."

"There might be something in the Black library. I know Ptolemy did a survey of old Egyptian shadow magic...but you don't read Greek, so—"

"Wait, Ptolemy of Heliopolis? Do you have a copy of his classification of ritual magics?"

"Oh! Yeah, probably. That one would _definitely_ be in Greek, though, I'd have to translate it — it'd take some work, you don't want translation errors when dealing with ritual magic. But I'll look into it. Why?"

"I was just wondering, I'd read a bit about elemental interactions in weatherworking, and I was thinking that..."

* * *

_Oh, poor Hermione, thinking she's much weirder than she actually is — imagine, being physically attracted to someone because they've just done something you find seriously impressive! And they've done it **specifically for you**! (Honestly, that girl...)_

_Wandering around talking about magical theory sounds like a perfectly legitimate date to me. Though my first date with Lysandra also involved wandering around talking about magical theory, so I may be biased. —Leigha_

_And in our case, it was even worse, because we were **talking about magic theory in fanfiction**. At least for Lyra and Hermione, magic is actually real. Such nerds, we are._

_Anyway, Hermione is awkward and adorable, one more summer scene to go, woo. —Lysandra_


	13. The Cool Aunt

"What the fuck is _that_?"

Her minder for the day, a veela going by Côme — their people might be (in)famously open to political refugees, especially from a nation with Britain's reputation, but that didn't mean they'd just let a black mage wander around the colony without someone keeping an eye on her — shot her a level, forbidding glare. "I'm sure you didn't mean to say it like that."

She sort of _did_, though. They were making their way toward the central plaza to get lunch (Côme had had to remind her to eat again, she could be terrible about that), and among the crowd of veela and lilin and humans one particular person had drawn her eye. It was a young boy, too old for the nursery but too young for school, his magic touched with the soothing chill and sharp bite of a lilin. But...he _wasn't_. Bella couldn't say exactly how she knew, since the difference between lilin (or veela) and humans wasn't truly _that_ great, especially in children, but she did.

That child was human, but had lilin magic. _Somehow_.

"No, seriously, that kid right there, what _is_ that?"

Côme gave her another disapproving look, probably at how she was just shamelessly pointing at him, but he clearly decided after a moment it wasn't doing any good. With a slight sigh, he said, "He's half-human."

"...That's impossible." Lilin and veela were very particular about keeping their secrets, so Bella wasn't certain of the details of how it worked, but she _did_ know that humans and lilin couldn't interbreed. Nor could veela and humans. Which shouldn't be any surprise whatsoever — they might be very cagey about how exactly their reproduction worked, but she was pretty sure lilin and veela _laid eggs_.

_Here I was under the impression you didn't believe in the impossible._

_Yeah, but I'm me._

Eris just giggled.

"It was," Côme admitted, "until quite recently. Lise Delacour designed a method to...circumvent the biological incompatibilities."

Bella instantly recognised that as a veela name — "Delacour" was used when dealing with humans by a clan named Ćur, the vast majority of whom were veela. The Delacours happened to be one of the more numerous and influential veela clans in western Europe, and _also_ happened to be one of the major clans making up this colony. Which made it quite likely this Lise lived here.

However exactly that half-breed child had been created, it _had_ to be a form of blood alchemy, a branch of ritual blood magic, and _very old_ — most heritable magical traits and even a few entire races of magical beings had their origins in blood alchemy. Some were thought to have been performed so long ago they were literally _prehistoric_, legacies of the earliest experiments with ritual magic in western and southern Asia. Omniglottalism, parseltongue, certain divinatory talents, both types of vampires, veela and lilin themselves, all of them were created through blood alchemy. Even _werewolves_ were thought to have been an attempt to artificially acquire the abilities of animagi gone horribly wrong. The art was very strictly regulated these days, and few had the stomach for the truly innovative experiments anymore, but none could deny blood alchemy had had a transformative effect on practically every aspect of the magical world.

Despite being illegal in modern Britain, ritualised blood alchemy _was_ sometimes still performed by certain individuals among the nobility. Britons had a long history of using it to cure certain deficiencies brought about by inbreeding, or by couples who had difficulty conceiving, or even sometimes simply to get around incompatible sexual orientations. It wasn't considered entirely appropriate to go blabbing about it, but it was widely known that a minority but non-zero proportion of the noble class augmented their own fertility with illegal blood magic, the tradition had gone unacknowledged but undenied for generations.

In fact, Bella had long suspected that Cygnus — not _that_ Cygnus, her great-grandfather — and Violetta had exploited it liberally. Her great-grandmother had had a not-so-secret fascination with blood magic, and they'd managed to have five children, which was quite unusual among their segment of the nobility. And their children had featured Pollux and Castor, twins, Cassiopeia, the first Black metamorph in a century, Marius, a squib, and Dorea, born twenty years after her eldest brothers and _shockingly_ well-adjusted for a Black — yeah, Bella wouldn't be surprised if they had blood alchemy to thank for that peculiar record.

It wasn't even unique for members of incompatible species to create offspring through blood magic — the most obvious example was between humans and goblins, that happened with some frequency, but it'd been done with giants and a few races of lesser fae too. The thing was, the products of these rituals were, essentially, a new race all their own. In most cases, they truly belonged to neither of their parent races, and would need to use blood alchemy themselves if they wished to have children with either. Eventually, if they bred with one of the two preferentially, the traits of the other race would filter out until they were more or less indistinguishable from the first, but it did take a few generations before further blood alchemy was no longer necessary.

But, this could only be done between species that had similar reproductive cycles. Veela and lilin were simply too different. It'd been attempted in the past, but it'd always failed. Spectacularly.

Also? That boy was _a human with lilin magic_. That was _completely bloody impossible_.

So, there was really only one thing to say to that. "Can I meet her?"

Lise Delacour, it turned out, had an office of sorts on the fringe of her clan's compound, the signage on the front openly declaring she was a practising blood alchemist (and also artificer, apparently), featuring a list of services she performed, walk-in hours, information on how to make an appointment for a consultation. Which was just _completely fascinating_ — openly advertising that sort of thing on the bloody street, with the culture of magic back in Britain this was simply inconceivable, she _loved_ the Continent sometimes. The first room on entering was a sort of shop space, various enchanted trinkets displayed for sale, a teenage veela girl manning the till. She was old enough her people's mental abilities had manifested but young enough she hadn't quite developed full control of it, but of course it didn't affect Bella, she was only distantly aware of the giddy energy prickling at the edges of her mind. After a brief exchange with the girl, Côme led her further back, into a rather ordinary office, desk and bookshelves in rosey woods, rich but slightly disheveled, the feeling of the place more academic than professional.

Reclined in the chair behind the desk, spooning from a bowl of soup while reading a book propped up against her knees, was— "Wait, _Liz Potter?"_

The woman coughed, feet tipping back to the ground, nearly spilling her soup all over the text. The round-faced, dark-haired witch was only half-familiar, but that was to be expected — she had to be nearly fifty by now, Bella hadn't seen her since she'd been in third or fourth year, and then knew her mostly just as the only Slytherin prefect with an actual sense of humour, but it was _definitely_ Liz Potter, she'd recognise that asymmetrical, unruly hair anywhere. (The infamous Potter hair _was_ quite distinctive.) Last she'd heard, Liz had run away to the Continent, Bella wasn't even certain she'd taken her NEWTs. She'd done _something_ to anger Charlus, she'd gotten disowned, it'd been a _massive_ scandal, had gotten in the papers and everything. Bella hadn't paid too much attention at the time, she'd been too preoccupied with recruiting for Tom and Zee being Zee, but _apparently_ she was an accomplished blood alchemist now, and going by Dela—

"Gods and Powers, did you _run away to Aquitania_ to marry _a veela?!_ How did I not know about that, that's _hilarious!"_

Finally done coughing up the soup she'd inhaled, Liz frowned up at her. "...Fuck me, it's Bella Black."

Bella couldn't help laughing a little — she remembered Liz saying that exact thing to her once before, in nearly the same tone. In first year she'd stumbled upon Liz and Kelsey Prewett snogging in a corner, it was this whole thing.

"What are you even doing here? Aren't you supposed to be in Azkaban?"

She shrugged. "Eh, I got bored. So I hear you're a blood alchemist now."

"No, seriously, what the fuck are you doing here?"

"I'm here because a bloody veela colony in fucking Aquitania isn't likely to report where I am to the British Aurors, now, are they? So, about the blood alchemy..."

Liz let out a long sigh, eyes tipping to the ceiling for a moment. "I'm not going to get you to go away if I don't answer your questions, am I?"

"Nope! Can you blame me? You apparently found a way to make lilin half-breeds which, _I_ was under the impression that was impossible."

A slight scowl twisting her lips, Liz said, "Yes, well, you might have noticed I have little respect for people telling me I can't do things. I'm rather known for it, in fact."

"We have that in common." Of course, the thing _Liz_ was known for involved refusing to marry, or even playing along with the whole courting thing the slightest bit, then basically throwing a tantrum and running away to the Continent when the Lord of her House refused to humour her. Bella's similar reputation was much less...mundane, in the particulars.

Bella draped herself across one of the chairs in front of the messy desk, grinning. "So, how does that work, exactly? I'm not so clear on the details, but I was pretty sure lilin and veela laid eggs?" The statement came out sounding more like a question, because she really _didn't_ know — it was a rumour, the People had never actually confirmed it.

"I'm sure I couldn't say," Liz said, tone light and airy. (Which, fine, Bella guessed it was sort of like a family secret, still irritating.) "It's a variation on the ritual I'm sure you're familiar with — blood from the parents is mixed and alchemised to create an embryo, which is then implanted into a human woman. Obviously, I do have to do something different than the usual, since human and veela blood is incompatible. But no, I'm not going to tell you what it is."

"Aww, why not?"

"Well, for one thing, I'm bound by Imperial edict to not reveal the particulars to anyone outside of the community. Also, piss off."

If she were in a less patient mood, that might have angered her. Instead she just laughed. "All right fine, keep your secrets. Just let me analyse one of your specimens instead."

The wary sort of amusement on Liz's face abruptly collapsed into a glare. "No."

"Come on, I won't hurt it!" Anything that would be too painful would masque the results of analysis charms, after all.

"I'm not going to let you play around with one of my kids, Black. Fuck off."

"Really, they won't—" Bella broke off, a moment of surprise quickly breaking into glee. "Wait, _your_ kids? Did you make one for yourself, then?"

The glare only got more intense. "Why do you think I did it in the first place?"

"Er, I don't really think you need a _reason_ to do fun blood alchemy experiments."

"They're not _experiments_. Is it really so hard to understand that I wanted to start a family with my wife?"

Well...yes? It was, actually. Bella didn't really get why people would _want_ children — especially to want it so badly she'd essentially had to create a _new subspecies of humanity_ to pull it off, that was just completely foreign to her. But there was no point to explaining that. "Just because you had a personal reason for doing it doesn't mean they're not fascinating specimens."

"They're my _children_, not my—"

"Wait, _wife_? Can two women get married in Aquitania now?"

That was enough to throw Liz off for a moment, blinking back at Bella in a tense sort of bafflement. "Um... Yes, obviously. It's been legal here for near on a century now, you know, and not just in Aquitania. The muggles have even started talking about it recently."

"Huh." She'd somehow never heard about that. Not that it mattered, at all. "Anyway, I don't see what the big deal is. It's not like I'm going to hurt them."

"It's the principle of the matter, Black."

"Yeah, I really don't get that."

"I really don't expect you to."

Bella let out a slight scoff, shaking her head. It was _quite_ obvious Liz wasn't going to bend on this. Which meant, unfortunately, she was just going to have to leave this mystery unsolved. The only way she was going to get enough time to examine one of these things properly was with permission — judging by Liz's age the oldest were probably still children, and she assumed the parents of the others would be equally unwilling to agree. And just kidnapping one for a few hours would present its own problems. If she started doing shite like that, she was certain she'd outstay her welcome very, _very_ quickly.

She'd probably get away without too much trouble, but she'd seriously offend the People in the process, which she didn't want to do if she could avoid it. She _liked_ the People, they were fun.

"All right, _fine_, be boring. So, why are you holed up by yourself out here on the Continent anyway?"

Liz raised a doubtful eyebrow. "I'm living in a commune with a veela clan. I'm hardly _holed up by myself_."

Bella shrugged. "Good point." The People did have ideas of community and property that could seem a bit...unnerving, to normal people. Personally, Bella didn't find their society any more odd and confusing than she did the one she'd been born into, but she was hardly a normal person. "Not really what I meant, though. Guess I'm just a little surprised you've so thoroughly abandoned your responsibilities to your family."

Mostly because, well, even _she_ was still _interested _in the future of her House, and she'd killed off damn near all of them. If there had been someone running around claiming to be a long-lost Black heir (who _wasn't_ an alternate universe version of herself), she was pretty sure she would want to at least drop in on them a few times, make sure they would live up to the legacy of the House. (Or if they didn't, finish the job — there would really be no point reviving the House of Black if everything that separated them from the other Noble Houses was gone.) And even if Liz wasn't really in contact with anyone in Britain anymore, Bella was still sure she'd heard that James had had a kid at some point. He'd just been in the papers _again_, what with Lyra faking his death and the Old Goat reacting completely predictably.

"I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about. In fact, I've been told I'm the cool aunt."

"Uh-huh." The sound was tinged with a note of sarcasm, though she didn't actually doubt it — if there'd been an openly practicing blood-alchemist-slash-artificer in the Family, one who didn't take herself too seriously at that, she'd probably have been Bella's favourite aunt too. The closest thing the Blacks had had in her time was Violetta, but she'd been too self-righteous and _very_ boring. "Not what I'm talking about and you know it. I would have thought you'd have gotten the same indoctrination I did growing up — until James was born, you _were_ the only heir the Potters had, after all."

Her face sinking into a glare — not truly harsh, but more exasperated, tired — Liz said, "I haven't any responsibilities to House Potter anymore, Black."

"But Charlus has been dead for ages, now, and given the circum—"

"I was disowned. _Twice_."

Well, she'd been _going_ to say that House Potter would probably take her back (she doubted Lyra would have much trouble convincing Harry to do something like that), but— _What_? Bella frowned. "How the fuck do you get disowned _twice_?"

"The second was mostly in a figurative sense, but the point stands." Lifting one shoulder in a lazy shrug, "I was told by both previous Lords Potter that I was no longer any family of theirs. Jamie even disinvited me from my own father's funeral, so, that bridge hasn't been burned so much as nuked."

_Seriously?_ Even _Bella_ had never been banned from a _funeral_. "What did you _do_?"

Liz let out another irritated sigh, but did actually answer the question — probably trying to make the point clearer. "I wrote ahead to arrange temporarily keying us into the wards at the Manor. It was the safest place for us to go — given the political situation at the time, I was concerned for my family's safety, I'm sure you understand."

Bella smirked. That was a remarkably politic way to refer to the fear that the Death Eaters, who she had to know Bella had mostly trained, might have taken the opportunity to torture and murder them all. And a remarkably _boring _reason to be disinvited.

"Jamie insisted my family was not welcome. I would either come alone, or not at all. I said a few things about what Dorea would think of that sort of attitude which, in retrospect, could have been worded better. We exchanged a few more less-than-pleasant letters, which ended with Jamie saying that I was no longer welcome in his family, and he never wanted to see me again.

"So, Black, I _have_ no responsibilities to the House of Potter. Kindly piss off."

Well, she couldn't argue with any of that, she guessed. "Fine, the Potters might have disowned you, but does that actually matter? I mean, Andromeda named her daughter _Nymphadora_, for Circe's sake, and _she_ disowned _us_. Are you telling me you aren't even _curious_ about the Potter kid? I would be, if it was me."

Liz hesitated, her glare wavering for a moment. "Curious...maybe. Yes. A little. But certainly not enough to go sticking my nose in — Jamie's son is none of my business, and definitely not my responsibility, so." The _piss off_ was heavily implied.

Bella ignored it, because, well...she was wrong. "He kind of is, though. I mean, you still count as a Black — I know _we _didn't disown you — and Harry is our—"

"_What?_ The Blacks _couldn't_ have disowned me, they never owned me in the first place!"

"Your mother was a Black, that's good enough for us." One of those relics of originally having been a matriarchal family, the House law recognised children born to Black women whether they were technically born into the House or not. The weren't incorporated into the Family Magic (anymore), but still.

A baffled note slipping into her glare, Liz drawled, "Er, _no_, my mother was _not_ a Black. She was a Fawley."

Oh, right, sometimes she forgot Dorea had been Charlus's _second_ wife, she— Bella blinked. "Then why did Dorea keep bringing you to family functions?" She'd seen Liz at Black gatherings more often than James, actually...though by the time James started getting old enough for Bella to really notice him she'd been distracted with the war, and the family had shrunk to the point there weren't nearly so many opportunities to bump into him. And by that time, she was mostly aware of him as one of those Gryffindors Narcissa insisted were having a _terrible_ influence on Sirius. Come to think of it, if he was a little Light prat like Charlus (which he probably had been, he _had _joined Dumbledore's little vigilante group, after all), Dorea might not have brought him at all by then. So she guessed that sort of made sense. Except for Liz being there at all, that is. "Did she blood adopt you or something?"

"I think I would have noticed if she had. Blood alchemy rituals can be quite painful, you know."

"Huh, that's weird. I wouldn't have thought Arcturus would approve of Dorea bringing you around, then."

"I was never allowed at the _really_ private things," Liz said, lifting a shoulder in another lazy shrug. "The holiday rituals, for example, I was never invited to those." Well, yeah, but she _had _been at funerals and introduction rituals, and those weren't the sort of things outsiders were supposed to witness, either. That was..._weird_.

"Did you ever just try to show up?" Liz gave her a _look_, eloquently expressing how very stupid she thought that sounded. (Even though it _really _wasn't.) "Should've tried it. It's not like there were invitation cards, Dorea just decided to stop attending after she married Charlus." Dorea had been sort of odd — from a Black perspective, in the sense that she'd actually been rather normal — she'd probably been all too happy to have an excuse to avoid the Family's more extreme rituals. "Still would have been welcome, though." Not that it mattered, really. "In any case, from what I've heard Harry hasn't gotten anything like the appropriate education. House Potter is pretty much screwed."

Liz blinked at her for a long moment, shaking her head slightly at the abrupt reversion of the topic of conversation. "What do you care?"

"Well, aside from the marriage alliance, the Potters' heir apparent _is _our Lord's godson. House Potter is House Black business."

Liz rolled her eyes. "Fine, whatever, it's Black business. But it's not my business, not anymore. Shouldn't be yours for that matter, aren't you a Lestrange now?"

"Oh, like I ever was really, that was a sham and everyone knows it." Bella didn't know why Liz had even bothered bringing that up, she still called her Black anyway. She grinned. "Besides, Caelan found some excuse to break my marriage contract and disowned me back in Eighty-One, can't imagine _why_." Really, that was one of the few political developments she'd heard about since her escape that she actually _approved _of. "But, fine, if you don't want to have anything to do with the Potters, I suppose that's fair. Sirius and Lyra will take care of it. Just, you know, Harry won't really be a Potter, then — they can't give him a proper House Potter education. The only person alive who learned the family lore and traditions is you. If you stay here, it all dies with you."

"I didn't run away for no reason. Perhaps it's better it dies." By the light, distant tone of Liz's voice, it was pretty clear she didn't actually believe that.

"Yeah, well, the nice thing about the House almost-but-not-quite dying is the few people who are left get to decide what they carry forward. And no institution exists for seven hundred years without developing _something_ of worth."

Liz just glared at her for a few long, silent seconds. Then she changed the subject. "Yes, speaking of Houses narrowly avoiding extinction, where the hell did the House of Black manage to find an heir? That _is_ the Lyra you mentioned, yes?"

"Mmm, yep," Bella confirmed, running through the list of potential explanations Lyra and Blaise had offered to various people regarding her origins. There was only one that would stand up to any degree of rigorous investigation. "You weren't wrong when you assumed I was familiar with that particular ritual."

Liz raised an eyebrow at her. "You made a child for yourself. _You_. Weren't you just saying that you didn't want kids?"

She hadn't, actually, but she supposed it might have been obvious from her reaction, earlier. She didn't actually _dislike_ children, not any more than she did most humans, but they did tend to be a bit dull, certainly not conceptually interesting enough to _want_ one.

"I didn't want the House to fall, either. And besides, it's not like I had to deal with her during the boring years, I was in Azkaban." Which had probably been far more boring than playing nursemaid to a small child would have been, especially considering that the hypothetical child in question was herself, and she _knew_ she had been a little hellion even before she'd made her dedication, but that wasn't the point.

"Who did you— You _did_ use multiple parental contributions, didn't you?"

Bella grinned. If she actually _had _decided that making a child for herself seemed like a good idea, she might have tried using Tom, but he had sacrificed his ability to have children. Not _natural_ children, _any _children. Which probably would have fucked up the whole process. Besides, ignoring concerns about the product having a distinct identity, it was _much _easier to create a copy of a single person than to combine the blood of two or more into a single embryo. (Theoretically, she'd never actually _tried_ it.) "Why mess with perfection?"

"So you're telling me you straight-up cloned yourself." Well she had certainly _implied_ as much. "Using a surrogate, I assume. And, what? Just sent her off to live with... Who? Who the _fuck_ would you trust to raise your precious heir? And who the fuck would _do_ it?"

"Well, given that I also implied that she wouldn't really be a Black if she didn't get a proper education, you could assume that I would have found it worthwhile to track down Cassiopeia and convince her that the plan held enough merit to warrant her cooperation." At the blank look Liz gave her, she added, "One of the Black metamorphs."

Comprehension dawned, and with it, a degree of horror. _Tee hee_. "You're serious? You actually... Do people _know_? I assume you don't care about the ethics of the situation, but does _she_ know?"

Bella smirked. "Yes, Lyra knows exactly where she came from, and why. I don't believe she cares about the ethics of the situation, either. And she's been in the public eye for almost a year, now. I'd be shocked if no one else has come to this conclusion yet. It _is _the most reasonable explanation for her existence."

"...Fuck me — there're _really _two of you?"

"Yep. The other one is currently off taking care of your nephew. The human one. You really should consider dropping by Britain at some point, unless you _want _the most responsible person in his life to be a fourteen-year-old _me_," Bella teased. Though (external loyalties aside) she'd been a very good First Daughter at the age of fourteen. Really, there were _far _worse people who could be responsible for the Potter kid's future and general wellbeing (like Sirius, or _Dumbledore_), but Liz didn't know that.

And now she was annoyed again. "I have an appointment in five minutes, Black. Get the fuck out of my office."

Bella rather doubted that — who set appointments for twenty-five minutes past the hour? — but she'd already gotten what she'd wanted, or rather, asked and not gotten it; there was really nothing to be gained in further annoying Delacour with her nonexistent duties to her natal House; and there was only so long she could not-lie about something without fucking it up, so it was probably best to end the conversation here, anyway. She smirked, vacating her chair and heading toward the door with an airy farewell. "_Ciao_, then. I'll tell Lyra to expect you at some point. And let me know if you change your mind about that examination."

"Not likely, Black."

Yes, well, unlikely things _were _known to happen around Bella, on occasion. (Eris's amusement radiated through her, an involuntary grin spreading across her face.) She could wait.

* * *

_Bringing in another of my OCs, so why the fuck not. This subplot sprung into existence from me and Leigha just randomly talking about shit while slightly intoxicated, so...all the rest of you just get to live with the consequences, I_ guess xD_ —Lysandra_

_When Bella mentions the issue of identity, she's referring to a magical connection between blood, one's understanding of oneself, and one's magic — the 'fundamental identity' thing that comes up occasionally in some of my stuff. Basically, this means that it's totally plausible for a blood alchemy clone to read really oddly to some magic, mostly divination charms. It's a much more reasonable explanation than 'time traveller from the past' for, say, Lyra and Bella having magical signatures which are nearly identical, or a spell to determine Lyra's birth-date coming up with Bella's. (Lyra mentioned over Easter that magic thinks she's forty-four.) They aren't exactly the same, that comes up in another summer scene, but similar enough that anything short of proper wards wouldn't necessarily examine their identities closely enough to distinguish them. —Leigha_


	14. Tiny human bitch

"_Pst! Clarence!_"

Clarence, who had admittedly not been paying as much attention as he probably should to the discussion of the pack's finances and plans to move further south for the winter, startled at the sound of a child's voice behind him.

Bram looked over at him as he quietly slipped out of his place in the circle, but it wasn't entirely unusual for Clarence, who had been Fenrir's second-in-command for nearly two decades, now, to excuse himself from these meetings to take care of some matter or other back at the camp.

He led the boy far enough away that they wouldn't distract from the debate in progress — whether they ought to send a few more adults out looking for work in the real world, and if so, who — before asking, "What is it, Wil? Is everyone okay?"

Wil was the oldest of the youngsters, now — fourteen, according to Anika and her magic. He, like many of the children in the pack, had been fending for himself — on the streets of Frankfurt, in Wil's case — before Fenrir and Lena had found him. He was supposed to be keeping an eye on the other six kids (and two wilderfolk wolf-pups) back at the camp. Which was admittedly a pretty boring job — none of them really required much looking after, and the younger ones knew better than to run off by themselves.

"No, no, everyone's fine, it's just— There's a woman. She just walked into the camp, I thought she was wilderfolk at first, but she smells human."

"Did you capture her?" Strangers very rarely just stumbled upon the pack — they _did _have spells to hide themselves, make humans avoid them. Whenever someone managed to get past the spells, they had to be detained until he and Fenrir could question them about how they'd found the camp.

"I didn't have to — she said she wanted to talk to Fenrir, she'd watch the kids while I went to find him." The look on Clarence's face must have communicated his disapproval, because the boy quickly added, "I sent Kiki to find Claudia and Erich and told them to keep an eye on things."

Claudia and Erich were only eleven and twelve respectively, but Erich had some talent for magic, and Claudia was...uncommonly good at predicting the immediate future, even if she didn't actually seem to be able to do the same kind of magic as the other mages in the group. They often hunted in the woods around the camp, rather than play with the younger children. Clarence sighed, but reluctantly admitted to himself that they would at _least _be able to raise the alarm if their...visitor tried anything.

"Okay, fine. This woman, did she say who she is?"

"No, she just said to tell Fenrir that his favorite tiny human bitch is back."

The bottom dropped out of Clarence's stomach. There was only one person in the world Fenrir called _tiny human bitch_, but he'd..._thought_ she'd gone to prison when the War ended. Of course, there was also a rumor going around that she had died a couple months ago, attempting to escape, so it wasn't out of the question... "About this tall?" he asked, holding a hand about level with his own collar bones. "Godawful pale, black hair and eyes? Smells human, moves like wilderfolk, and gives orders like disobeying is inconceivable?"

"Er, yeah. Who is she?"

_Fucking _trouble_, that's who. _"_Bellatrix_."

"Who?"

The Blackheart, Thom de Mort's mad dog. She made Loki — their old pack leader, the one who'd once beaten a new-turned ten-year-old to death over his refusal to join them — look like a kindly old man. And she was alone, at the camp, with the kids... "FENRIR!"

"What? Who is she?" Wil repeated, trailing behind him. "Why are you so— She seemed fine. _Weird_, but not _dangerous_, or anything..."

Yeah, that's what they'd thought at first, too. And to be fair, she might not have any ill intentions toward them at all. But she _had_ threatened to kill them all if she ever saw them again the last time they'd spoken, and he somehow doubted the past thirteen years had done her sanity any favors. If she was _here_...

Fenrir broke off whatever he was saying as they broke into the circle. "Clarence?"

"We need to go, Fen— We need to get back to the camp, _right now_."

"Why? What's going on?"

"Bellatrix is here."

"But—"

Clarence cut the alpha off with a quick shake of the head. "Your _favorite tiny human bitch_, was it?"

Will nodded. "Er, yeah, but—"

"Everybody back to camp! Be ready to fight, but don't provoke her!" Fenrir ordered. "Did she say why she's here, kid?"

"Uh, no, just that she wants to talk to you."

"What do you think?" he asked Clarence.

"Fuck if I know. We didn't part on good terms, but if she wanted to kill them, why would she have sent Wil for us? We would have gone back and found them eventually..."

"Let's go," Fenrir snapped, leading the way back toward camp at a quick jog.

When they reached the clearing the children tended to use as their play yard, Clarence was treated to what might have been the _oddest _scene he'd ever seen — at least, oddest for Bellatrix. If it had been Lena or Anika sitting cross-legged on the ground, scratching Harmonie's ears and...apparently giving Claudia advice on fighting the larger, heavier Erich (who currently had her pinned to the ground), it would have been perfectly ordinary, but...

He knew Bella had raised her little sisters and cousins, but he'd never really seen her interact with them outside of training and formal dinners.

She raised an eyebrow as the pack broke the tree line, Fenrir and himself approaching slowly.

"Really, Mickey? The whole pack, just for little old me?" She bent her head to address the wolf-pup lying half across her lap in a language Clarence didn't recognize — they'd picked up the pups somewhere in Russia, but they didn't seem to understand Russian. The younger wolf pup trotted off to go sit with her sister at the edge of the trees. _Typical_. She'd been here all of fifteen minutes, and she'd already gotten further with those little furballs than he and Lena had in eight _months_. He tried not to be too put out about it. There would be plenty of time for jealousy later, assuming she didn't kill him. She stood, stretching her back.

"Why are you here, Bellatrix?"

"Well, I was in the neighborhood, and I figured you'd be able to fill me in on the latest news. The veela I was staying with don't really keep up with the Resistance."

There was so much in just that handful of words that made so _little _sense. Veela? Why had she been staying with _veela_? She wanted information about the anti-statutarians? And _in the neighborhood_? There weren't any veela colonies for hundreds of miles in any direction...

"No, why are you _here_, and not in your wizards' prison?"

"Or dead," Clarence chimed in.

She grinned. "I'm not dead because, well, I'm _me_. Did you really think the Magical British government could stop me if I wanted to leave? I think I might be insulted."

"Last we heard, you'd gone to Azkaban with the dementors."

Voluntarily. Because Bella had completely lost her mind when de Mort had died, or so they'd heard. The pack had left Britain the year before that. The spring of 1980 had been a bad one. If it had just been the losses the pack had suffered, they might have stayed, they'd re-built before. But it had been becoming undeniably obvious that de Mort was losing it himself. There had been no chance, at that point, for the Revolution to succeed. Bella had not appreciated it when Fenrir had told her that. She'd appreciated it even less when he'd asked her if she'd considered just cutting down old snake-face and stepping into his place.

"Yes, well, I've recently had an opportunity to...examine my life's choices, you might say. I've decided to move on. Obviously I've been out of the loop for a while, though, so..."

"So if I were to say that de Mort was a stupid son of a whore and he was nothing more than dead weight after that red-headed bitch cursed him..." Fenrir said, one hand hovering warily over the hilt of his knife.

Bellatrix sighed. "Are you really going to make me say it?" She pouted. When Fenrir failed to react, she sighed again. "_Fine_, Mickey! _You were right_. I should have killed him when it became clear we were not going to be able to recruit Evans and convince her to fix him, and pressed forward without him. The man I followed was dead long before he was defeated."

Fenrir relaxed. "Stand down, everyone."

"So glad I passed your little test," the woman said, rolling her eyes and smirking at them.

So...apparently they were friends again? Well, Clarence wasn't about to complain — that was certainly preferable to being her enemy.

"Lots of new faces, here. Are you going to introduce me?"

He grinned. "Allow me to do the honors." Both Fenrir and Bella nodded and gestured for him to continue, causing Fenrir to glare at her and her to smirk back, exactly as though the past fifteen years had never happened. "Everyone, this is Bellatrix. We used to work with her in Britain. She's insane. Bella, this is everyone. Please don't kill them, we like them."

The woman scoffed at that. "I don't kill people just because I can, Clarence."

"Since when?" Hati called from somewhere off to his left.

"Eighty-One, Ass-Hat," she retorted, sauntering across the clearing to offer Fenrir and himself proper greetings.

It had always amused Clarence that she insisted on observing werewolf conventions, when she was never half so respectful of even the most powerful humans (barring de Mort, of course). Even in the beginning, when she'd disdained everything about them, she had made a point of it. Honestly, Clarence suspected she just _preferred _their way of doing things. A thousand years of breeding, born to power and money and magic, to a life of ease and luxury, and she was more comfortable slumming with the likes of them than acting the part she was born to play. He bent down to bury his nose in her hair, allowing her to do the same. She still smelled like blood and lightning — dark magic and death — still grinned at him like she knew _exactly _what her scent did to him. (The Wolf _liked _dark magic and death, despite Clarence's better judgment.) "Missed you, Hela."

She giggled, grinning up at him. "Hmm, yes, I can't even _imagine _how dull your lives must have been all these years without me. So, fill me in, boys — what have I missed?"

* * *

The hours until dinner passed surprisingly smoothly — thirteen years of political developments (and developments within the pack) provided plenty of relatively neutral conversation topics, most of which were of little interest to the vast majority of the pack. At dinner, however, as the others joined them to eat around the fire, the atmosphere quickly grew tense.

Lena, Fenrir's wife, was generally a kind, patient soul. Clarence had never imagined she might have a jealous bone in her body. But Bellatrix had usurped her place at Fenrir's right hand and Lena was very clearly growing annoyed at her monopolizing his attention.

On top of that, Bella had a habit of stealing food off Fenrir's plate — a one-time dominance play which had become almost an inside joke between them by the end, an ironic reminder of the stupid children they'd been when they first met. Her constant use of his given name and his favorite epithet for her — _tiny human bitch_ — were the same. The few members of the pack who had been with Fenrir in Britain — who had fought alongside her — were accustomed to their constant mutual disrespect, well aware that it was all in show.

It hadn't always been, of course. When they'd first met, Bella had had nothing but scorn for them — subhuman trash, she'd called them — and they'd thought her a spoilt, arrogant little human girl with more money than sense who — fighting abilities notwithstanding — had most likely gotten where she was in the Death Eaters by sucking the Dark Lord's dick. (She _had _been fucking him, of course, but that had nothing to do with her position in the organization.)

It had taken _months _for her to truly earn their respect, even _with _having (narrowly) beaten Fenrir in a dominance challenge when they'd first met. They'd told themselves she'd cheated, using magic, even if it wasn't casting spells — she was still just a pushy little human bitch who wanted to play with the big boys. Even after watching her lead a raid, carrying it out with ruthless efficiency, they'd had no respect for her personally. She'd commanded her men well, sure, but no degree of leadership competency would make up for the fact that she was only human. _That_ she had only overcome by demonstrating that, human or not, she was a _much _bigger monster than any of them. It had taken nearly five _years_ for a real sense of camaraderie to grow between them, and she had _not _been happy when Fenrir decided to cut his losses after the slaughter at Hogsmeade.

Most of the pack, however, had not been with them in Britain. Of the original dozen of them who had joined de Mort, only Fenrir, Hati, and Clarence himself remained. Anika, Jason, and Ellie had become pack before they'd left Britain, and so also knew Bella. Everyone else was watching her be her usual pushy self with various degrees of discomfort. Most because her behavior suggested that Fenrir was subordinate to her, and though he wasn't acting particularly subordinate, he also wasn't contesting her claim the same way he would if any of _them _had dared touch his food or called him _Mickey_ — most of them hadn't even _known _his human name before today. Hati had never heard anyone other than Bella use it, and Loki had turned him and his brother only eighteen months after Fenrir.

Lena, however, was definitely growing jealous. Understandable, really. Bella's physical behavior — sitting so close to him that their knees were touching, for example — _could _be read as particularly forward flirting, especially since Fenrir didn't act as though it was a challenge. Clarence was absolutely certain Bella realised this, but she delighted in causing trouble, even for people she _liked_.

He was so caught up in watching Lena, thinking of ways to diffuse the situation that would inevitably erupt between them before she unthinkingly challenged Bella and Bella took her apart, that he missed Petrov and Bram muttering together on the other side of the fire until Petrov called over the conversation, "Some alpha he is, letting this _human_ join our circle, letting her eat our food and treat him like a fucking _lap-dog_!"

A growl trickled out of Fenrir's throat. Clarence sighed. This had been coming for a while — Petrov was one of the newer members of the pack, a violent radical who'd heard about their mission to carve out a place for themselves outside of the reservations so _very_ charitably allotted to them by certain magical states, and been disappointed to discover that they spent more time working to feed the children than slaughtering human villages.

(Ironically enough, Bellatrix had _also _been rather disappointed to discover this. It had taken all of five minutes discussing the direction the pack had taken in the past few years for her to offer them a fucking vinyard, because she never _had_ had any concept of money.)

Petrov was particularly disappointed in Fenrir, who was a very different man now than he had been thirty years ago, or even fifteen, and being an angry young idiot — much like Fenrir had been when he'd overthrown Loki and led them to join de Mort's forces — had been making noises lately about how things _should _be run. How they _would_ be run, if _he_ were their leader. It was only a matter of time until he moved to make an actual challenge.

Before Fenrir could say anything in response, however, Bella beat him to it. "Hey, Mickey, it's been a while, so correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't challenges supposed to take place around the full moon?"

Fenrir snapped around to focus on Bella, smirking at him like it was still 1979. They exchanged a very brief, silent conversation which Clarence interpreted as _I want to hurt someone, and he just volunteered_ and _you're clearly still insane, tiny human bitch — but if you must..._

Petrov lunged to his feet, ignoring Bram's attempts to reason with him. "Who does this stupid little cunt think she is, involving herself in pack matters?! If you won't stand up to her, Fenrir, I will!"

"I _think_ I'm Bellatrix Black," she said, still lounging nonchalantly beside Fenrir, taking another swallow from the bottle they'd been passing around. "You know," she added, in response to his obvious lack of recognition at the name, "it's been a _very _long time since I've met anyone who hasn't already heard of me. I suppose I could give you a demonstration as to _why_. It's been like...twenty-seven hours since I've killed anyone."

Fenrir snorted. "I can't have you just going around killing my people, Bella."

"Ha! As if she could! I'd like to see her try!"

Bella grinned. "Would you really?"

"Sit down, Rocks-For-Brains," Ellie warned Petrov. "She could kill us _all _if she wanted to. And she has a right to comment on your asinine criticisms because unlike _some _people, she actually _earned _her place in this pack."

Well, if one could consider leading them through a fucking war to be earning her place. She had been the lieutenant Fenrir reported to, their main source of contact with the Death Eaters and de Mort's other forces, and they had come to appreciate her willingness to interact with them — she might have openly disdained them for years, but most of the wizards refused to have anything to do with them, as though they could be turned simply by _talking _to a werewolf. They appreciated her honesty about it. The _real _source of their esteem for her, however, was her willingness to go into battle alongside them, rather than issuing commands to their division from the safety of the back lines like...pretty much any of the Dark Lord's other lieutenants.

Well, that and they had eventually discovered that she wasn't _really _human, even if she had been born one. In the spring of '72, even before she'd come around to admitting that she preferred their company to her own people's, she'd taken it into her head to run with them on the full moon. As a human. Even _de Mort _had thought _that _was mad, and he _never _casually called her insane like everyone else. But she could disappear into the shadows if they ever got too close to biting her, so he'd allowed it. And... It was hard to explain, exactly how the Change worked, but the collection of curse-borne instincts that overwhelmed them on the Moon— The Wolf...didn't quite recognize her as human. There was too much magic in her, like a veela or a vampire — they knew instinctively that the Curse wouldn't take if they bit her. If she _ran_, of course, they'd _chase_, but not with the same single-minded determination to proliferate the Curse that they would feel toward any _actual _human.

"Plus, there was the whole eyeball thing..." Hati said, with a shit-eating grin to match Bella's own.

"If I'd known all it would take for you idiots to take me seriously was a little cannibalism, I would have done it _months_ before you came up with that stupid challenge game," she grumbled.

Clarence snorted. It also didn't hurt that she very clearly didn't consider _herself _human, either. Not in any way that suggested the vast majority of them — magical or not — were anything more than animals to be used and discarded at her slightest whim. Like when Fenrir had challenged her to eat a human eyeball, and she promptly went and killed someone because _there weren't any spare eyeballs in camp_. (In Fenrir's defense, he'd been trying to get her to fuck off, no one had thought she'd actually _do _it. They _really _hadn't known her yet.)

"Who did you kill yesterday?" Hati asked, in an obvious bid to change the subject. Ellie and Bram, on the other side of the fire, were clearly making similar efforts with Petrov, though too quietly for Clarence to overhear.

"Eh, a couple of Hunters out of Rome. Followed them until I was close enough to actually trace your anti-tracking charms, but they'd served their purpose, so."

"Were you going to mention that at some point?" Fenrir asked her. Clarence agreed — it was _kind of important _to know that the Vatican was sending Hunters after them. Not to mention, their anti-tracking charms could be _tracked_?

"Yes. Just now." Hati passed her the vodka again. She knocked back another swallow before handing it to Fenrir.

"Care to _elaborate_ on the incident?"

"I thought you found my penchant for gratuitous violence off-putting, Clarence, but if you want details, I—"

"Hey!" Petrov shouted, still standing, fists clenched. He took a single step in their direction, a clear demand for Fenrir to take his challenge — which the alpha had still not even addressed, beyond giving Bella silent permission to deal with it — seriously. "Just because this little human freak kicked _your_ ass, _Mickey_—"

"Oh, hang on a second," Bella said, rolling her eyes. She stood and, faster than blinking, vanished, reappearing behind Petrov with a knife in her hand, sinking it between his ribs four times before he managed to turn around. Clarence didn't even think she'd used magic for that — the moving through shadows thing, yes, but she hadn't made herself faster — the little blue runes on her arms hadn't lit up. She ducked under his wild, unbalanced swing, came up with the blade poised to be driven through the underside of his jaw and into his brain. He froze as well as he could, coughing blood in her face, even as everyone nearby scrambled away. "Are you sure you don't want me to kill him, Mikael? He's stupid enough he's bound to make a nuisance of himself eventually."

Fenrir sighed. "_No_, Bella, I don't want you to kill him. If and when he challenges me, I'll do it myself."

"Ugh_, fine_." She pouted, but instead of striking a killing blow, she carved a quick 'X' over his heart, deep enough Clarence was _sure _she'd nicked a rib or two. "Do yourself a favor and remember, when you finally work up the balls to challenge Fenrir, that you owe your life to his mercy. And I'm the only one who gets to call him Mickey."

And then he was on the ground and she was sitting in Fenrir's shadow again, Anika rushing to Petrov's side. "Was that really necessary, Bellatrix?" she asked in her most grandmotherly tone of disapproval, kneeling to inspect his wounds.

"Uh...yes? You know how much I hate it when people talk about me like I'm not _right there_. And it's not like I used silver, he'll heal. If you're going to speed the process for him, let the cross leave a scar. Just to help him remember not to underestimate tiny human bitches."

"As _you_ should remember you don't give orders, here," Fenrir murmured, quietly enough that those beyond Bella and Clarence wouldn't overhear. Not that many of them seemed interested in sticking around, or in most cases, returning after fleeing Bella's demonstration of the dangers of overconfidence. Even Ellie seemed shaken, helping Anika get Petrov back to his tent. Since leaving Britain, they'd taken the pack in a _much _less violent direction — the war had taken its toll on all of the survivors. Most of the new members had never seen real bloodshed outside of full moons.

"Anika knows she doesn't have to _follow _my orders. Actually, I don't think she's _ever _followed my orders?" She hadn't. Bella had taught Anika some of the spells they used to hide themselves, but the older woman had been turned in her fifties and was no kind of warrior. She had been one of the few pack members who hadn't had anything to do with the Death Eaters. "Anyway, pretty sure that makes it more of a suggestion."

"Uh-_huh_. You have blood on your face," he noted, wiping a drop off the tip of her nose and licking it from his finger.

She twisted her face into an expression of false disgust, then grinned at him. "So, all is right with the world, then."

"Not everything," Lena snapped, stalking around the fire to glare down at the two of them. Clearly Fenrir apparently reciprocating Bella's "flirting" was a step too far — enough of an insult that she _had_ to say something, even directly in the wake of Bella demonstrating that she was, in fact, as insane as Clarence had warned them all.

It was almost funny, really, the expression on Fenrir's face as he looked up at his glowering wife. "What?"

"You can't tell me you haven't noticed this slut practically hanging all over you!"

The alpha looked down at Bellatrix, completely flummoxed. She sniggered, but it was Clarence who answered. "Easy, Lena. There's nothing between them. Never has been."

"Yeah, chill," Hati agreed. "There's a reason we call her Hela."

Fenrir nodded, shoving Clarence to move further down the log they were using as a bench, making room for Lena between them. She immediately tucked herself under his other arm, glaring across his torso at Bella, who twiddled her (bloody) fingers mockingly in return. "She is like my sister. My tiny, annoying sister who thinks she is in charge of everything, all the time."

"Not _everything_, just you, and training, and the Time Turner project, and... Oh! Assassinations, I was in charge of assassinations," she said absently, cleaning her knife on her tunic and scrubbing the blood off her hand with a bit of dirt. "_Special Operations_, whatever."

Fenrir chuckled. "My tiny, annoying, _drunk _sister," he corrected himself.

"Oh, go fuck yourself, Mikael, it's been thirteen years since I got drunk, I think I'm due."

Hati sniggered. "I was going to go with her being Death's bitch, actually." Which was also a fair point. She'd been in de Mort's bed well before the pack had joined him. Clarence was pretty sure she'd never even fucked her _husband_. "Her Dark Lord," he explained, for Lena's benefit. "She went to prison waiting for him to come back from the dead."

"He's not dead, I'd know if he died," she said, turning her arm to reveal what _had _been a detailed tattoo of a skull and a snake, but which now resembled a faded, grey burn scar. "The color would fade entirely if he were entirely gone."

"So, why are you here, then, if you still think he's going to come back?" Hati asked.

"I told you, I decided to move on."

"Yeah, but...why?"

Bella groaned theatrically. "Okay, remember back forever ago when I told you about my goddess?"

"_Yes_..." Hati said, shooting a quick glance at Fenrir. The subject of Bella's goddess was one they had never agreed on. Hati didn't believe she existed. He didn't believe in any gods at all. Bella explaining that gods and magic were really the same thing and he'd _seen _her using magic, hadn't really helped. Fenrir, on the other hand, had been a Christian before he'd been turned, and had a very hard time understanding Bella's conception of many Gods and Powers, despite his belief that at least _one _god _did _exist (and hated him, but that was a separate issue). Clarence hadn't entirely thought Bella was being serious when she had told them that she served a goddess of chaos, thus it was her sacred duty to fuck up as many people's lives as possible.

"Well, apparently she took exception to how thoroughly Tom managed to domesticate me—"

"_You_. Domesticated?" Fenrir repeated, obviously as much at a loss as Clarence to think of any _less _domesticated person he'd ever met.

"Yes. I know you lot think I'm a fucking savage, but in case you forgot, I _did _spend the last decade and change in fucking Azkaban waiting on him like a good little puppy. Anyway, Eris dragged another version of me to this dimension, and the two of them colluded to force me to re-examine my entire life. Which incidentally incapacitated me for almost a month and brought me to the attention of the Department of Mysteries. And you know how I feel about the Department of Mysteries. So I left, sailed to France, spent a few weeks with a veela colony recovering from being in a bloody coma and pushing myself...probably more than I should have to get out of Britain, then decided since I didn't have anything else to do, I'd look you up and figure out the best way to cause the most chaos for everyone over the next couple of years."

"You're not going to try to revive the Revolution in Britain?"

"Eh, I figured the other me could do that. Start with something more familiar, you know? She _is _only a kid, and not _nearly _as familiar with the political situation as I was at her age, being from another universe and all."

"Uh..._huh_," Lena said, _very _skeptically. "How much of that is true?"

Bella leaned around Fenrir to look her in the eye. "Does it matter?"

It didn't, but Clarence suspected that somehow, no matter how fantastic it sounded, the answer was all of it.


	15. An Even Tinier Human Bitch

This, Bellatrix decided, was weird.

_This_ was lounging around an empty field which _should_ contain a manor — which was currently slightly out of sync with this universe due to the fact that Sirius and Lyra had broken the Family Magic, so she was no longer recognised by the wards — watching a thirty-years-younger once-possible version of herself (Lyra was really _not _the same person she had been thirty years ago, a fact which was becoming ever-clearer by the moment) angrily pacing around her, telling her off for not wanting to kill Tom Riddle.

Or rather, because she failed to grasp the distinction between _Bella _having no interest in killing Tom, and Bella hypothetically not wanting _Lyra _to kill Tom. Which she didn't care about, and had never said she did.

_I'm pretty sure I was a better listener when I was her age,_ she remarked to Eris.

The goddess made a vague, inarticulate response which, had it been audible, Bella might have characterised as grumbling under her breath. She was nearly as annoyed about Bella's disinterest in avenging herself on Tom as Lyra was, though Bella was quite certain that was because Eris knew she was right, not because she'd failed to understand Bella's actual intent.

Possibly also because Bella hadn't been able to resist winding the goddess up, just a bit, when she'd first woken up, dragging her into an argument about morality and whether Tom was truly in the _wrong_, shaping the personality of her five-year-old self, given that Eris had done something _very _similar to pre-Walpurgis Bella's personality, re-writing her to better suit herself. Maybe worse, that had fucking _hurt_. Tom's compulsions had been much more subtle, and therefore _far_ less painful.

The grumbling grew louder — more uncomfortable.

_Yes, fine, we've already had that conversation, and yes, I apologise for my complete disinterest in expressing any degree of respect even to you. We both know whose fault that is— _(Eris's) —_but nevertheless..._

_Oh, shut up, _Eris finally responded. _You agreed I had every right to do what I did, and he didn't, I don't know _why _you keep bringing it up._

_Mostly to annoy you. _

Eris being a goddess and Bella's Patron in no way exempted her from the occasional spot of teasing. If anything, it just made it easier to get to her, sharing the sort of connection they did. And what was she going to do about it, really? Nothing. The answer was nothing. She'd gone to _way _too much effort to 'restore autonomy' to Bella, she wasn't going to do anything to compromise it, now. She would just sit at the back of Bella's mind being all frustrated, and it was fucking hilarious. Eris was just _entirely _unaccustomed to anyone taking the piss with her.

_Lyra asked you a question_.

Had she? Bella hadn't been paying attention. In addition to being really _weird_, being yelled at by a tiny, irrationally angry version of herself was kind of boring. She _was _just standing there, though, so she probably _had_ asked something. Her hands were parked firmly on her waist in a highly recognisable _disapproving_ stance, magic whipping around her, her aura sparking almost visibly in her anger. _I see someone's coming into her power_, she noted. Eris ignored her.

"You're not even listening to me!"

"Only fair, since your entire tirade is based on not listening to _me_. Well, that and being a moody teenager."

"I am _not_, and what the fuck are you talking about, all _you _said was that you weren't going to go back to Britain, and didn't want me to kill Riddle — your _exact words_ were 'I'm not entirely convinced he did anything wrong, really' — yes, I was listening! And let me tell you, that is just too fucking bad, because I've already started recruiting people, and—"

Bella silenced her, much as she would any annoying child. Though she used a _far _more complex binding than she would have on Cissy or Reggie, just to make her younger self have to work a bit at dispelling it.

Hati crept over in the ensuing silence. "Bella, not to interrupt or anything, but, ah..." He nodded over his shoulder, drawing her attention to the crowd of anxious werewolves watching her argue with Lyra — in English, so hardly any of them understood the words, and from the tone, they could be forgiven for thinking that Lyra was reluctant to cede the vinyard to their control.

"Don't worry, I wouldn't drag you halfway across Europe just to turn around and go back. This argument has no bearing on your taking over the vinyard. She'll key us into the wards after she gets this little fit of pique out of her system." (Magic snapped around her as Bella characterised Lyra's fit of pique as such, but the term was entirely accurate.)

"Er. Right," the wolf muttered, darting a frightened look at the girl. He never had been terribly comfortable with magic, she suddenly recalled. "And, um. Just to clarify...is... This Tom Riddle you've been arguing about is de Mort?"

"_Yes_," Lyra snapped, finally having broken the silencing upon herself. "The same fucking _bastard_ who stole her from our goddess and turned her into a fucking _mind slave_, and made her kill off basically our whole fucking Family! And she, for some reason, _still_ doesn't want him _dead_!"

Bella renewed the hex. Lyra broke it immediately this time, of course, but for a brief moment was speechless anyway, nearly incandescent in her rage. (_Ha_. She was nearly as unaccustomed to dealing with teasing as Eris.) "Pay attention this time, _elfling_ — I don't have a problem with _you _killing Tom. All I _said _was that _I _don't particularly want to kill him. I don't hold what he did to me against him, and he doesn't belong to Eris so you have no right to expect him to conform to our moral principles."

"But—"

"No, if it comes down to it, _she_ doesn't have any grounds to complain, either. Much as she may try to deny it, she knew when she accepted my dedication that I was already his creature, and she actively encouraged our association because leading his army was the position from which I could cause the most chaos."

Lyra scowled at her, the magic around her calming significantly, though she clearly wasn't quite ready to give up her argument. "What about what he made you do to the House? And _don't_ try to tell me you _had_ to kill _all _of them. They weren't _all _like Cygnus."

Bella shrugged. "No. Most of them were like Andromeda. Terribly conventional, hardly lived up to the name at all. Some trees need to be pruned regularly to flourish." Honestly, the Family had grown into a sprawling, bloated _mess _by the 1960s, the magic in their blood too diluted by centuries of marrying outsiders. They'd been overdue for a culling. If Bella hadn't done it, she was quite certain the Dark would have found some other way to ensure the dead weight was cut out in another generation, two at most.

"So you don't think he _deserves_ to die."

"No."

"But you don't _not_ want him to die."

"Was that even English? I couldn't care less what happens to him. Pretty sure he'd find his current state of immortal powerlessness worse than death, but if you want to kill him, knock yourself out."

"Make that sound more condescending, why don't you."

"Could. Won't. Now, about the wards—"

Lyra muttered an incantation under her breath, her wand suddenly in her hand, flicking toward Bellatrix in a final parting shot, reduced to petulant violence because Bella was right, and Lyra knew it. A jagged bolt of purple energy — one of the more painful dismemberment curses, though slow enough to reverse before she'd lose more than a few toes — spanned the distance between them.

Bella didn't even try to counter it — at this distance, she wouldn't have been able to draw her wand in time, let alone cast the proper shield. Instead she let it wash over her, dragging at the energy of it, unraveling the intent behind it and channelling the magic into the runes carved into her skin instead. It passed over and through her in a wave, prickling as the runes lit in its wake before fading slowly back into dormancy.

She cackled, then added, "That's adorable, sweetie," the endearment specifically calculated to further annoy the girl, just to press home the point that this argument was over, and she had won.

Lyra, though, was thoroughly distracted by the runes, plopping down beside her to examine the scars — slightly raised, but nearly invisible against her naturally pale skin — more closely. "How did you _do_ that?"

"Subsume your curse, or the corporeal enchantment?"

"Uh...both? Obviously?"

"Add me to the wards first. With full permissions."

"Why aren't you already recognised?" Lyra complained, even as she drew her wand and began poking at the hard ward-line. (Crossing the soft line and attempting to access the hidden structure had alerted Lyra that there was something wrong here that required her attention, but they'd been kept out of the space where the manor ought to be entirely.) "I know the Family Magic is broken — and before you say anything, _yes_, I'm working on it, but coven magic is stupid, okay, and apparently nobody's written about it, like, _ever_ — but we're the same person, same magical signature, you should be able to do whatever you want already."

Bella snorted slightly. "You can't _possibly _believe that." Not only did Lyra (and Eris) think of the girl as _Lyra_ now, but she'd clearly been fucking around with deep magic in ways that humans...really weren't meant to and, unless Bella was reading her aura _very _wrong, she'd become shadow-kin at some point— (_Yule last_, Eris informed her.) —which meant that, similar as they might be, they weren't the _same_, by name, magic, _or_ blood.

Lyra turned to blink at her. "Way to sound like Severus, there."

"I'm sure Severus sounds like me, not the other way around." Actually, they might both have picked up that particular phrase from Tom, but it hardly mattered.

"Yeah, well, that's pretty much _exactly _what he said when I told him I couldn't possibly be an omniglot—"

"You _are_, but you have to stop occluding to pick anything up, you know. And you're kind of shite at mind magic, even for _me_."

"Er, yeah, that's what he said. Well, the first part, I know I'm pants at that shite. Have you two been talking? And if so, why did he write _me_ to ask you not to kill Nymphadora?"

Of course she hadn't been talking to Severus, Lyra was just being ridiculous, now. "Why would I kill Nymphadora? Isn't she in Carthage?"

"No— Well, yes, she is, as far as I know, but the other one, Meda's Dora."

"Why would I want to kill Nymphadora?" Bella repeated. "And why would Severus Snape give a single bloody fuck if I did or not?"

Lyra sighed, broke off her analysis charms long enough to pull a face. "Apparently Mad-Eye Moody convinced her to come over here and play Black Cloaks with him, hunting you down. And _he _didn't say so, but I'm pretty sure Snape cares because Dora seduced him. Twice. She was bragging about it last time I was in Hogsmeade. As though seducing _Severus Snape_ is something to be proud of."

Bella considered this for about half a second before deciding, "She could do worse." Granted, Severus was hardly the most _trustworthy _individual, but he _was_ a hell of a witch. Not really much of a fighter, but he'd been one of the most promising Death Eaters when it came to the _craft_ — potions, mind magic, and freeform casting, mostly. She'd be willing to bet that if he'd had more time to pursue the more esoteric arts (low ritual and weatherworking, for example), he'd have been just as good at those. They did require similar skillsets. Fuck, potions was actually considered a sub-discipline of low ritual by some practitioners. "Feel free to tell him that I had no intention of killing the more interesting of my sisters' offspring, and as long as he's good to her, he's on my list as well."

She'd heard people refer to lists of people they'd like to kill before, but she'd really always thought it made more sense to make a list of people she _didn't_ want to kill. Lyra presumably knew this, as she raised an eyebrow, smirking. "He should've been on the list anyway, I already recruited him for the Conspiracy to Kill Not-Professor Riddle. Also Ginevra Weasley. And Blaise Zabini." As though Zee's kid wasn't already on the list. "Ah, Sirius, Harry, Zee, Meda, Cissy, uh...Theo Nott, and Hermione Granger. They're not in the Conspiracy, but they should still be on the list."

"Fuck, I was already planning on leaving Britain to you, but seriously? At this rate I wouldn't be able to kill anyone in the entire bloody country! Who's Hermione Granger?" The rest of them she knew, or knew _of_. Though she wasn't entirely certain why Theo Nott should be on the list. (_He belongs to Mystery_, Eris informed her.)

Lyra broke off her casting again to see Bella's expression as she answered. "Maïa's my girlfriend. My _muggleborn_ girlfriend." Her face must have done something involuntary, because the girl fell to giggling almost at once.

"Excuse me, I think I must have misheard you, I thought you said you have a _girlfriend_." Because...that was just fucking _weird_.

"I did. A _muggleborn_ girlfriend."

"I don't give a fuck about that, she could be fucking _wilderfolk _for all I care — actually, that would make more sense. You mean like...actually dating, snogging girlfriend?"

"Yes...?"

"_Why_?"

"She asked and I didn't have a reason to say _no_. Why were you fucking Zee?" Okay, that was fair. But _girlfriend_ carried certain connotations that her relationship with Zee certainly didn't have. Like..._romance_, and emotional interdependency. "Also, her mother's going to be our Wizengamot proxy, so maybe just don't kill any Grangers."

Seriously? _That _was funny — much funnier than the Black Heiress dating a muggleborn. With Sirius as their Head of House, the muggleborn thing would hardly raise any eyebrows at all, but the Wizengamot would have a collective conniption if the House of Black actually installed a _muggle_ in their seat. She might have to come back just to see _that_. "But, no, seriously, this Hermione girl, she's just some normal human muggleborn?"

Lyra shrugged. "She's much smarter than most people — she can actually hold up her end of a real conversation — but yeah, more or less? Not like Zee and Blaise, if that's what you're thinking."

That _was _what she'd been thinking. Granted, she'd never spoken to Zee's son, but she could hardly imagine Zee raising a _normal_ child, and his sire _was_ an incubus, that was bound to have _some_ effect, as was the legilimens thing. (Eris had complained at length about her Bellatrices always falling in with bloody mind mages, as though mind mages weren't bloody _useful_.) If she had to guess, she'd expect Blaise to be more similar to Tom than Zee, but that was a relatively minor distinction, compared to the difference between either of them and...normal people. Granted, it had been a while since Bella had spent much time around _really _normal people, most of the Death Eaters had been a bit fucked in the head in various ways but...

Okay, yeah, the _girlfriend _thing might actually end up being funnier than the muggle Wizengamot proxy.

"You'll have to let me know how that goes."

"Oh, shut up, I know it's going to be a disaster. She'll probably try to kill me or something." Oh. If Lyra honestly thought this girl might ever try to kill her, Bella was willing to bet she wasn't quite as normal as Lyra thought she was, if only because a normal person with any intelligence at all would know that was suicidal. (Actually, come to think of it, an intelligent, truly normal person would never have asked Lyra to be her girlfriend in the first place.) "But it's not like it was _my _idea. Besides, I've already decided I'll just make Blaise deal with it, when it starts going badly." Admittedly not a poor solution to relationship drama, throwing the nearest Zabini at it — assuming Blaise took after either of his parents, that might actually work. "Give me your arm, I need your blood. Since apparently we aren't similar enough, despite literally being the same person." The kid rolled her eyes obliviously.

"Oh, hey, that reminds me, I told Liz Potter you're my daughter via blood alchemy."

"Er...why? I mean, yeah, that does seem to be the most recent cover-story, but— Wait, Liz is still alive? I didn't think Harry had any family. Where the fuck is she, and why isn't she in Britain taking care of her House?"

"Because it's the only halfway plausible excuse for your existence, and she's actually Lise Delacour, now. She—"

"She married a fucking veela? That's _great_."

"Oh, it gets better — she's a practicing blood alchemist, came up with a way to make _viable human-veela hybrids_. But yeah, she did get herself disowned, so you're stuck with the kid."

Lyra made a face at that, painting a handful of runes on an invisible wall with Bella's blood. Awareness of the wards and the manor hidden away within them flooded her mind. "He's not that bad, really. And he's really more Siri's problem, anyway. And Blaise's, I guess — the two of them have been mind-fucking for _months_ now. How did Potter make veela hybrids? I thought that was... Don't they _lay eggs_?"

Bella pouted at the absent Delacour. "Yes, they do. And she wouldn't tell me. _Or_ let me examine one of her specimens."

"_Rude_. I don't suppose you've decided who raised me while you were in Azkaban? We haven't specified, yet."

Bella shrugged. "Clearly not Zee, or Cissy, since you _just_ showed up. I heavily implied that it was Cassiopeia, but I don't actually know where she is, so if I really _had_ made a blood alchemy clone, and I had to find someone to raise it... Probably Mickey?"

"People would actually _believe_ that? Not that I was raised by werewolves — most people probably _would_ believe _that_ — but that you'd let your kid be raised by _Fenrir Greyback_?"

"Well, the Death Eaters would. The Inner Circle, at least." Lucy, for one, wouldn't even be surprised. "Though I suppose you could call him Mikael Giese. I'm not sure anyone else actually knows his name, so—"

"No, that's _great_, next time it comes up, I'm definitely telling whoever asks that I was raised by a notorious werewolf terrorist. So, that worked, right? Now I just have to figure out the—"

Bella cut her off, activating the triggers in the enchantments that brought the manor fully back into their plane and dropped the wards preventing their entry. It shimmered into existence, raising exclamations of shock and surprise from the pack, who had been keeping their distance — understandable, probably. If _she _thought the whole Lyra thing was _weird_, she could only imagine they found it incredibly disturbing, having _two _of her around. (Mickey had, after introducing himself, fled to fetch supplies from the nearby town rather than sit around chatting with his tiny human bitch and her _even tinier_ human bitch — a phrase he'd pronounced with a distinct note of horror. He was going to be _thrilled _to learn he'd been responsible for said tinier human bitch for the past thirteen years.) "I _have _been here before, you know."

Lyra stuck her tongue out at her. "I'll tell the goblins I was approached by a potential buyer for this place, get them to write something up. So, about the runic augmentation — how does that _work_? Because I was under the impression that that was supposed to be almost as impossible as human-veela hybrids."

Bella sighed, led the way inside and directed the wolves toward the guest wing before shrugging off her robes, trying to recall everything Tom had told her about the runes carved into her flesh. Enchanting had always been more _his_ interest than hers. "Well, it's not _that_ impossible, anyone _could_ do it, if they knew enough about human anatomy and had a subject willing to spend a few years in constant agony during the trial and error phase." She elaborated on the process for several minutes, describing the function of one set of runes after the next.

Lyra caught on _much _more quickly than she might have expected. "This one, though, what is this? I don't recognise it."

The symbol in question was on Bella's shoulder. Lyra projected an illusion of it so she could see. "Well, it's broken, for one thing. _This_ line isn't supposed to be there, that's from a cutting curse. But it's one of the symbols Tom developed for the project. It's based on a symbol for _depth_, integrated into a defining marker for _sinew_ — that's just High Elvish — with a tapering limitation so the effect only applies to the tendons within a specified area, but doesn't terminate abruptly, because _that_ almost always leads to stresses at the termination border beyond which the enchantment is not in effect." And _that_ led to snapped tendons, and muscles torn so precisely they could have been cut with a slicing charm. "Pretty sure the individual tendon or group it's focused on is determined based on the intent behind carving that symbol. And then the whole thing is referenced in the variable array, so I can apply any of the strength or elasticity or tension effects to the tendon without having to manually control that process." Which, because the mediating rune was broken, she did have to do, if she wanted to use those particular effects. It took _far_ too much concentration to be of any use in a fight.

"Ooh, I get it! And then _these_ would be for integration, almost like chaining your spells, making it almost automatic, right? That's really fucking clever, honestly, Riddle was _wasted _teaching Defense. Want me to fix it?"

"Er...what?"

"You know...excise the rune, heal the spot, re-carve it and re-integrate it into the array? He _had_ to have maintained this, I refuse to believe you've managed to avoid damaging enough of them over the years that _any _of the elements would still work, otherwise."

Well, _yes_, he _had_. _She'd_ maintained _some_ of them, the ones she could see, at least, in the years since Tom's initial decline. She just...hadn't really considered getting the others repaired. Aside from the fact that she would have to explain the entire process and meaning of each symbol and its role in the system to whoever she found to do the work, she was fairly certain there was no one she actually trusted to _do _it. Well, maybe Zee, but she was pants at...pretty much anything that required her to know _how_ magic worked, and obnoxiously squeamish about blood considering she was _a bloody serial killer_. Lyra, however, was almost certainly at _least _as good at enchanting as Bella was herself (probably better — Bella had never had much interest in the subject, and Lyra claimed to have been tutored by _Ciardha bloody Monroe_), and the alternate version of herself had no reason to betray her, so. She shrugged. "Sure."

"_Neat!_ And you can do the same for me—" Ah, yes, she _had_ been wondering what had prompted the offer. "—seriously, this is like, the _best_ thing ever, I've been wanting to try it out since I saw that memory of you fighting Mickey."

"Ah, no."

Lyra glared at her. "What do you mean _no_?"

"I _mean _that's a terrible idea. In case you've forgotten, the British government does kind of want me dead. Not only would it be immediately obvious to _anyone _who happened to see you use them that you had been in contact with me — there _are _only two people in the world who could do this kind of enchanting, or could teach _you _to do it, and the other one's a fucking _wraith_ — but it's also _actually_ impossible to learn to use them without reducing yourself to a bloody pile of broken limbs several times a day, even if you didn't have to go through the development process, and I _know_ you don't have access to the sort of healing attention you'd need to manage it. Plus, I distinctly recall that Tom waited until I'd finished growing to start playing around with this. Something about not wanting to arrest the development of the metaphyseal regions of the long bones."

"Wait, he thought this could affect bone growth? And he didn't think to make you a few inches _taller_? What a waste..."

"I said _arrest_, not _stimulate_." Bella smirked. "But does it really matter how tall you are if you master freeform levitation?"

Lyra's eyes grew _very _wide at that idea. "_No_. No it does not. But I _distinctly _remember a broken arm attesting to the fact that I _can't_ just step off a balcony and fly. Ciardha was really bothered by my trying."

"Well, _yes_, you were _seven_." At least, assuming she'd tried that around the same age Bella had. Unlike _Ciardha Monroe_ — the alternate universe thing still struck her as incredibly surreal, at times — Tom hadn't been the least bit concerned, simply told her to jump off something shorter next time. Which...seemed obvious, in hindsight. "You should be able to channel enough magic to manage it in a year or two." Maybe sooner — she had a suspicion that Eris's much greater presence in Lyra might have accelerated her magical development compared to Bella's own, not to mention the shadow-kin thing had probably enhanced her channelling threshold a bit. "Just practice with benches, not balconies, you'll be fine."

"Noted. But are you _sure_ you won't do something for me? Just a _little _enchantment. Like, I don't know...a balance charm, or something?"

"Anyone could give you a balance-improving tattoo." The girl pouted at her. "I'll get rid of your scars, if you want," she offered instead. Not that she didn't think Lyra would consider the magic itself enough of a reward to fix her runes, but she wasn't entirely opposed to doing _something_ nice for her younger alternative self. Tom had taken care of hers, back when she'd initially defeated Cygnus, but if she didn't have anyone she trusted to cut on her, Lyra almost certainly didn't either. Well, Meda, possibly, but Meda would probably refuse to do it, force her to get an actual healer to look at them. And it wasn't as though Bella wouldn't enjoy the project just as much as Lyra, albeit in a rather different way.

Lyra considered the idea for a long moment, probably trying to decide whether she wanted this badly enough to spend that long lying in one spot (or possibly just appreciating how surreal it was deciding whether to let herself essentially be tortured by her alternate self), but eventually she nodded. Bella had known she would. She'd considered Cygnus's existence to be largely irrelevant once she'd finally made him stop with her, but it had _still _made her absolutely _furious_ every time she'd seen the scars or had to cover them up, been reminded of the days when she _couldn't_ make him stop.

"Lovely." Should be fun. "Mine first. You won't be in any state to carve runes after yours."

The girl grimaced. Right, she wouldn't have any reason to have altered her perception of pain and pleasure — probably didn't have the slightest idea how, given her complete lack of experience with mind magic. Well, it would still be fun for Bella. And she stood by her assessment that Lyra wouldn't be in a fit state to carve runes afterward, if for rather a different reason than she'd initially thought.

"_Fine_. Here—" Lyra conjured a few sheets of parchment and a pencil. "—draw the ones that are broken and explain what they're supposed to do..."

"Just a second — Mélodie!" The older of the two wilderfolk pups was by far the less adventurous of the two. Her sister had run off with the rest of the children when they'd entered the manor, but she had been lurking in a corner, keeping a wary eye on Lyra, as though this strange girl and the storm of magic which she'd been at the center of for the majority of the time she'd been here were less dangerous if Mélodie knew exactly where she was. Though she wasn't exactly reluctant to leave when Bella gave her an excuse. "_Find Erich. Bring him here._"

The pup scampered away, even as Lyra asked, "What the fuck was _that_?"

"Ah...I'm pretty sure the language is called _karjala_. I don't really know it that well—" She'd picked up a bit from an ancient crone Tom had been questioning about soul magic, but they'd killed her before Bella had learned her native language fluently. "—but that's fine, Mélodie and Harmonie don't either. I told her to go find Erich, he's one of their mages, could use the healing practice."

"Er...right. So, that omniglot thing, how does that work?"

Bella grinned, started drawing the necessary runes. "Well, _magic_, obviously."

Lyra made an inarticulate noise of frustration, causing her grin to morph into an obvious smirk. It _probably _shouldn't be this fun to annoy her alternate self, but Zee had been right, Bella was adorable at fourteen, especially when she was all pissed off and trying to pretend she wasn't. Tee hee.

* * *

_Shadow-kin — There actually is a word for what a person becomes when they subsume the essence of an element, as Lyra did in her Yule ritual. Lyra doesn't know this. The most noticeable effects (like everything looking weird unless it's in a shadow) have worn off now, but she was still changed by the process, making her more vulnerable to Light magic and sensitive to sunlight._

_When Bella says Severus is a hell of a witch, she means in the sense of 'witchcraft and wizardry' wherein witchcraft refers to potions and herbology, certain kinds of healing and enchanting, scrying, ritual and so on. The art of wizardry includes most wanded magic — charms and transfigurations, some kinds of enchanting, and arithmantic approaches to understanding magic. Most mages use both witchcraft and wizardry at least to some extent, including Severus, but he's really, really good at witchcraft, whereas he's just a decent wizard, not particularly outstanding. (Dumbledore could be considered the inverse, an exceptional wizard but a middling witch. —Lysandra)_

_Karjala is Karelian, a language spoken in a region in the far north-west of Russia (with little bits in eastern Finland). (Karjala is a close relative of Finnish, both members of the Uralic language family, and I could go on forever about how fascinating I find these languages, but nobody wants to read that. —Lysandra) The pack picked up the wilderfolk kids somewhere in Russia, but they don't speak Russian, the only human language they speak is a bit of this._

_While it's possible Zee actually told Bella that she was adorable back when they were fourteen, this actually refers to Zee's assessment of Lyra. She and Bella have written to each other since Bella escaped, though they haven't met up in person._

_—Leigha_


	16. This one's clearly on Evans

"_Who dares _summon _Lord Voldemort like some common _demon_?!" the man in question hissed and spat, Parsel coming more naturally to him than English, especially in his current state — insubstantial and writhing in pain. Someone, some incredibly foolish, entitled, _arrogant _man, hooded and robed in black, his mind guarded, but still projecting ecstatic triumph, had had the _audacity _to _invoke _him, dragging him through the aether, bound by chains of magic as insubstantial as himself, disintegrated and re-composed within the boundaries of — as he realised, attempting to throw himself at the man (soon to be _dead _for this insult) to no avail — a circle which held him as firmly as the summoning magic had only moments before._

"_It is I, my Lord," the man hissed back, lowering his hood to reveal sandy blond hair and intense, wide-set brown eyes. His pale face was thin, almost starved, his expression worshipful. _

_Lord Voldemort's fury vanished in an instant. The man's appearance — the _boy_, he was barely in his thirties, hardly more than a child — identified him _far _less clearly than the fact that he had responded to the Dark Lord's (entirely rhetorical) question in the same language. Much as he had always _hated _the man who sired him, Bartemius Crouch Junior _was _his father's son, sharing his gift for learning even the most magical of languages — though the one loyal to Lord Voldemort was far more resourceful in his use of it. (What good was an omniglot in law enforcement? _His _Crouch was a ward-breaker, one of the best.) _

_He scratched a break in the circle, even as he begged, "Please, my Lord, forgive my impertinence, my Lord, but I– I had to find you, I have been searching—"_

_In that moment, as he realised the truth — that a loyal servant had finally, _finally_, returned to him, that he would soon return to Britain, pick up his war, make Dumbledore and his lackeys and that _Potter _boy _pay _for the circumstances to which he had been reduced over the past thirteen years — white-hot triumph flared to life in _him _as well, dwarfing that of his servant, casting his joy into shadow as he wrapped himself around him, demanding entry into his mind._

_Crouch dropped his barriers, welcoming his master's presence, entirely open to him. In an instant Voldemort perceived the tortures the boy had suffered over the same span as himself, kept prisoner in his own home by his oh-so-self-righteous sire, under the influence of the most terrible of the Unforgivable curses, broken free by a loyal servant as he would break his own Lord free of this horrible half-life, _restoring _him, his loyalty, his _love — _for it _was _love, love for the man who had raised young Barty from obscurity, who had recognised his talents and given him a purpose beyond attempting to earn the respect of a sire who had never truly seen him — restoring his Master, his true father, to power and glory. And, if his Lord saw fit to reward his loyalty, his sire's precious Britain would _burn_._

Yes, oh _yes_, my child_, Voldemort whispered directly into his mind_. You _will_ be rewarded for the loyalty you have shown me, rewarded beyond your _wildest_ dreams...

* * *

Halfway around the world, Harry Potter woke screaming, his hand flying to his forehead, the scar there, the legacy of his impossible survival in the face of the wrath of a murderous madman, burning as though hot iron had just been touched to the _inside_ of his skin.

Clapping his hand to the scar did absolutely nothing to lessen the pain, and his screams did nothing more than summon a handful of variously startled witches and wizards to, presumably, assist him in fending off whatever intruder had caused his alarm. At least, Sirius (fearsome and furious and utterly naked) had his wand out as he burst through the doorway, quickly followed by Blaise (wide-eyed, confused concern on his face, with as little regard for nightclothes as Sirius) and his mother, her hair a sleep tousled mess. The less said about Mirabella's sleeping attire, the better, really. Harry was in pain and barely conscious and he _still_ could hardly look away from the attention-grabbing lace and layers of see-through fabric. Though, given that the alternatives were his very naked godfather and the equally naked (very fit) boy he fancied, perhaps he couldn't be blamed for focusing on Mirabella's very eye-catching...what was that thing even called? Surely it couldn't count as _clothing_, Harry was pretty sure it would have drawn _less _attention if she wasn't wearing anything at all.

It would _definitely _have been less distracting than Blaise taking a seat at the end of his bed, as though it was completely natural to jump into bed with a bloke when you weren't wearing anything, acting as though he hadn't even _noticed_ Harry's distraction (which he almost _certainly _had, even with Harry quickly pulling his knees up to his chest, because the sheet was thin enough that it _draped_, making everything _far_ more obvious, and even if it didn't, he was fairly certain his face was _literally glowing_), asking all seriously whether he was okay, and what had happened.

"Yeah, seconded," Lyra drawled, coming to lean on the doorframe, fully clothed (_thank God_), and looking far less concerned than the others. She had a book in one hand, clearly hadn't gone to bed yet. "I _know_ I didn't feel the wards trip, so..."

"Er, no— It's nothing, really. I'm sorry, I just— You can all go back to bed, it was just a dream, really. Sorry I woke you."

"Were you dreaming you were being murdered? Because it kind of sounded like it."

_I was dreaming I wanted to kill myself, does that count? _"No, no, I... I don't even really remember what it was about, now, I just. I'm sorry, could we please not make a big deal out of this?"

Sirius nodded, though the look he gave him was rather suspicious. "If you're sure, pup..."

"I am, just— I'm fine, I swear. You can go back to bed."

Sirius nodded reluctantly, but clearly didn't have anything else to offer in this situation. (Harry didn't have any better idea what you were even supposed to do when your kid woke you up having a nightmare. Aunt Petunia had only ever banged on the door of his cupboard to wake him up, and berated him for waking everyone _else_ up...) "Okay. But, you know, if you need anything, just yell, I'm right next door."

As if Harry would be waking everyone up _again _if he could help it. He nodded anyway.

Apparently sufficiently assured that he'd done his godfatherly duty, Sirius looked around rather awkwardly for a moment before leaving with a tiny shrug and a double-take at Mirabella's...attire.

She stayed long enough to say, "If you kids are going to stay up for a while, please try to keep it down? I have to be up in—" (She yawned and checked the time: just after three.) "—three hours."

Blaise nodded, as though he _did_ have some intention of staying up for a while. (Great, he was probably going to make a big bloody fuss over Harry, which he _hated_...)

"Er, yeah, sorry, Mira."

"Don't worry about it, dear. I know it wasn't intentional."

"I'll put up a silencing," Lyra assured her, though it appeared she had no intention of joining Blaise in his fuss-making, since she stepped outside before pulling her wand. "Harry, Blaise." She nodded in farewell in that way purebloods tended to do, as though this was any other social call, before smirking at Mirabella. "So, Zee, what's with the _déshabillé_? I thought you hated nightgowns with a fury and passion to shake the world with the voice of thunder and much misquoting of Shakespeare."

"Yes, well, I've come to appreciate them since..." She yawned, cutting herself off. "When the hell did I say that, anyway?"

"Er...right." Lyra cast the silencing palling with a few flicks of her wand and a muttered incantation, cutting off the rest of their conversation as they disappeared from the doorway.

"Does their relationship ever strike you as...really _odd_?" Harry asked Blaise, both in a somewhat desperate bid to avoid discussing the nightmare he'd just had — which of _course_ he remembered (because occlumency), and Blaise _knew_ he remembered (because legilimency) — and also because, well...they _were_.

"No, never," Blaise said, completely straight-faced, which just— No, Harry refused to believe that.

Blaise's own relationship with his mother might be pretty strange, even for the magical world (Daphne had confirmed this), but that didn't mean he didn't know what normal looked like. And, well...the way Lyra acted with Mirabella reminded him more of the way she acted with _Hermione_ than anything. And he was _pretty sure_ there was something going on with Lyra and Hermione. Like, a dating sort of something — which was kind of terrifying, they'd probably end up taking over the world or blow up the school or something, but not the point. He hadn't said anything because, well...Lyra actually seemed to _like_ Mirabella, he was pretty sure she wouldn't appreciate it if he suggested there was something going on between them that there really shouldn't be. And, okay, he didn't think they were actually _doing_ anything (necessarily), maybe Lyra just fancied Mira or something, but it still made him uncomfortable, whatever.

"Liar."

"No, really. Okay, yes, they're both weird people, but I know what you're thinking, and no. They're friends. That's it. Well, Mira used to know her mother, I'm pretty sure Lyra knew her before she came here — to Britain, I mean — but no, it's nothing like _that_. Mirabella's a shameless slut, but she doesn't go for kids. And you're trying to change the subject."

"Fuck yes, I am. You know who Lyra's mother is?"

"Yes, obviously. She _is_ my godmother. Why did you lie about not remembering that dream? What was it?"

"Obviously because I don't want to talk about it. And..._I don't want to talk about it_." Really, he'd rather not _think_ about it, it had been..._he_ had been... "So about that subject change — who the fuck is Lyra's mother?"

"I'm not going to answer your questions if you don't answer mine."

"I— You..." Harry glared at him. He suspected that Blaise wouldn't answer his questions _anyway_, he'd done a pretty fucking good job avoiding telling Harry anything about Lyra that she hadn't already told him herself. "Promise you'll answer mine if I answer yours," he demanded.

Blaise shrugged. "Sure. You first, though."

Harry groaned. On the one hand, he really didn't want to talk about his dream — the longer he was awake, the more absurd it seemed, being so afraid of it (though his scar was _still_ prickling uncomfortably, even though he was sure he _was_ awake, and definitely himself) — but on the other, this was the closest he'd gotten to finding out anything about Lyra that she hadn't told him herself in..._ever_. And while he wasn't as obsessively curious as _some_ people he could think of, he _really _wanted to know who the fuck Lyra actually _was_. Not that he expected the answer to be that interesting, really, just... It annoyed him, having her rub it in his face pretty much constantly (possibly unintentionally, but _still_) that he didn't really know anything about her. (And he _really _didn't want to talk about the dream, it would give him an excuse to change the subject, after he told Blaise about it.)

"Fine. I dreamed I was Riddle. Voldemort. Like, the wraith version of him. He'd been summoned somehow, by...Bartemius Crouch? I think? I couldn't make out his thoughts that clearly, but."

"Wait, _make out his thoughts_?"

"Er, yeah?" What part of dreaming he _was_ Riddle was unclear?

"So...you actually thought you were him, or...?"

"_Yes_, Blaise," he snapped, completely failing to keep his annoyance out of his tone, but fuck it. "I _was_ him, I felt him being summoned — which hurts like a _bitch_, by the way — and how _furious_ he was, until he realised that Crouch was one of his people, and then how—" he broke off, shuddering. "He was pleased. Really pleased." That was an understatement, but. "He— Crouch let me — _him_ — possess him, and I— Riddle promised him that he'd be rewarded beyond his wildest dreams... He wanted to see Britain _burn_, Blaise. And Dumbledore. And _me_. And I wanted it too, more than I've ever wanted _anything_, it was..." It was fucking terrifying, was what it was. He'd never...scared himself, before, but that... Blaise looked kind of scared, too, actually. Well, he looked like he was focusing very hard on not feeling anything at all, which basically amounted to the same thing. "It was creepy as hell, okay, but it was just a dream," he said, trying to reassure them both.

Blaise shook his head. "I'm not sure it was, though."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"It _means_ that sounds a _hell_ of a lot like accidentally legilimising someone, having your mind drift into theirs, thinking you _are_ them, feeling what they feel, their thoughts kind of going on in the background, like you know they're not coming from you, but they feel like they're yours..."

Which was...eerily accurate, that description. But... "Don't be stupid. I was _asleep_. And I'm pretty fucking sure they were somewhere in Europe — not exactly an expert, here, but I don't think I managed to legilimise someone, who is an expert legilimens _himself_, in my _sleep_, from halfway around the bloody _world_." That was _ridiculous. _Just _absurd_.

Blaise wasn't acting like it was, though. "But your scar was hurting."

"So bloody what? It does that, sometimes." Granted, the last time it had had been when he'd been face to...weird mutated skull-face with Quirrelmort, but he was pretty fucking sure that wraith hadn't been in his fucking bedroom, so. It _had_ to be something else. Had to be.

"I think we need to talk to Snape."

"_I_ think you're overreacting. It was just a dream, Blaise. A weirdly vivid, horrible, nightmarish dream, but still a fucking dream. It didn't mean anything, I'm sure of it."

"_I'm_ sure you're in denial. Or, well, it seems like a good possibility at least. That doesn't sound like a normal dream, _at all_, so even if _you_ don't want to talk to Snape, I'm writing him. If _he_ tells me I'm overreacting, I'll drop it, but if not... Sleep-legilimising an undead fucking Dark Lord doesn't exactly seem like it'd be good for your health. Riddle _is_ a legilimens, like you said — he _is_ going to notice sooner or later. Probably sooner. _Hopefully_ Snape will have some idea how to teach you to stop, before that happens."

_Hopefully _Blaise was wrong, or completely full of shite. But, well...that wasn't how Harry's luck worked. It just wasn't. He wasn't quite ready to admit it, though. "I don't know, Blaise, it sounds— You realise how mad this sounds? Snape'll probably say I'm making shite up for attention, or something, tell me to bugger off."

"He'd _better_ not," Blaise said, frowning absently into the dark. It wasn't _really _dark, of course, there was always a sort of city glow coming in the windows, here, and Sirius had cast a light charm when he'd burst in, it hadn't quite faded entirely, yet, but still.

His petulant tone drew a reluctant smile from Harry. "What are you going to do, if he does?"

Blaise shrugged, moving to the desk in search of a spare bit of parchment and lighting a candle to write by. "Guilt him over neglecting his duty to Lily's memory by ignoring her son in his hour of need?" Harry winced. He really didn't like being reminded of the fact that Snape and his mother had been friends for...practically their entire lives. Well, hers, at least. "You may not know this about me, but I can be a bit manipulative at times." He grinned. Harry rolled his eyes. Yes, he was aware. "He won't, though. Now shush, I can't write and talk at the same time."

That was fine with Harry, he was content to just lie here, watching light and shadows flicker over Blaise's skin as he frowned at the parchment, absently brushing the end of his quill against his lips between words. He really was _infuriatingly _pretty. Well, the infuriating part was mostly him acting like he hadn't a bloody clue that Harry fancied him, when that was even more impossible than Harry legilimising fucking _Voldemort_ from _California_. But he was still _very..._

The feather brushed the corner of his mouth again. Harry wondered what he would do if he just...got up and kissed him. If he would pretend to be surprised. He _didn't_, of course, because he had no idea what to do _after_ spontaneously kissing a bloke. The only actual example he had was Lyra kissing _him_ to distract him that one time, and, well... Lyra probably was _not _a good example, immediately going back to talking about Sirius as though she _hadn't_ just done something thoroughly..._Lyra-ish_.

Though, now he was thinking of Lyra and godparents, and that seemed as good a way to distract him from his staring as any... "I answered _your_ question," he reminded Blaise.

"Hang on a second... Okay, I'm just going to say that I'm requesting a meeting at his earliest convenience regarding you and whether a shared experience can establish a basis for long-distance communication with another legilimens, which I think is sufficiently vague, in case the letter's intercepted, could just be me looking to establish something like that with you. But it's also sufficiently _weird_ that he'll understand that's not it. Especially since he knows we're together."

"Yeah, fine, whatever," Harry snapped, trying not to get distracted by that matter-of-fact _he knows we're together_, and completely different contexts in which that phrase might be uttered. "You promised you'd tell me who Lyra's mother is."

Blaise hesitated. "Let's send this, first. Do you think Hedwig would take it through the portal?"

Harry shrugged. Probably. She'd come through it to get to California in the first place. It _really _hadn't seemed like a good idea to bring an owl on an airplane. "I'll ask her to do it in the morning, a few hours won't make that much of a difference, and she's probably out hunting now, anyway. And you may not know this about me, but I _can_ tell when you're stalling."

Blaise gave him a weak smile, sighed. "It really doesn't matter, you know. Lyra's mother. It's not like she raised her."

"If it didn't matter, you wouldn't be trying to avoid telling me."

He had a point, and Blaise knew it. He sighed again. "Okay, it's just— Try not to hold it against her, okay, but I'm like, ninety...two per cent certain that that rumor about Bellatrix... Well, she definitely never had a child herself, but there are ways to make someone else carry a child for you, dark magic blood alchemy stuff."

Harry gaped at him. "Are— You're serious? You're seriously telling me that _Bellatrix Lestrange_ is Lyra's mother?" That was—

_Well, honestly?_ a traitorous little voice thought at the back of his mind, _That would explain...kind of a lot._

"She hasn't confirmed it, and neither has Mira, but that's what Sirius thinks, _and_ Dumbledore, according to Snape. And, well...pretty much anyone who ever _met_ Bellatrix." Including, Harry suddenly recalled, that man, the one Lyra said was Blaise's father, at Mirabella's wedding. Something about Mirabella being the godmother to Bellatrix's child, except she never had one... "And it makes a hell of a lot more sense than anything else I've managed to come up with."

"I...don't even know what to say to that. Wait, does that mean Bellatrix Lestrange is your godmother?" Harry asked, his brain latching on a peripheral detail which was...almost weirder than the idea that the mysterious "cousin" who'd appeared out of nowhere to take him under her wing, one of his best friends, his _first fucking kiss_, was actually the daughter of Riddle's right-hand woman.

Blaise shrugged. "She and Mira were friends at Hogwarts."

"Well, _yeah_, okay, but. By the time we were born, Lestrange was...Bellatrix fucking Lestrange!"

"Yeah. And at that point, it was starting to look a hell of a lot like Bellatrix fucking Lestrange was going to be the reigning Dark Lady of Magical Britain in a year or two. Mira had never supported Riddle even if she'd never really openly defied him, and she had known muggleborn and even _muggle _associates, even then. My understanding is, it seemed like a good idea to renew her relationship with Bellatrix, just in case. She's always been very practical like that."

That was just...just fucking _weird_ to think about, honestly. Especially when he thought of Mira _now_, being a bloody tech company CEO and having a muggle staff and a computer in her house. But he did have to admit, it made a sort of...very _ruthless_ sense. And as nice and kind of...weirdly not adult-ish as Mirabella could be, Harry was pretty sure no one could go from being pretty much a nobody in Magical Britain to one of the richest people in magical _or_ muggle Britain over the course of two decades _without_ being a _lot_ more ruthless than she generally seemed. _And_ she was a politician, a Department Head at the Ministry. And then there was the whole...husbands...thing. (She couldn't _really _be a serial killer, if the rumors were true, everyone would _know_, and...)

Okay, it had officially become weirder and more awkward to think about Bellatrix Lestrange being Blaise's godmother than it was to think about her being Lyra's mother. As _well _as the one-time potential Dark Lady...of...

"Blaise," he said, as a thought suddenly occurred to him, his voice impressively even, in his own mind.

"Yes, Harry?"

"If Bellatrix Lestrange is Lyra's mother, who the _fuck_ is her father? Who _raised _her, for that matter?"

"Er...who said she has one? I mean, we're talking about blood alchemy, here, and have you ever seen a picture of Bellatrix when she was our age? They're _identical_." Was it more disturbing to think that Lyra was a bloody _clone_ of Bellatrix Lestrange, or that she had a father out there as well, like, oh, _Tom fucking Riddle_, as had just occurred to him? Harry didn't know. The clone option was definitely _weirder_, which probably made it more likely. "No idea who raised her. Could've been one of the Black metamorphs, or one of Bellatrix's old associates from the War." He shrugged. _Shrugged_. As though it didn't even _matter_, which was just—

_Does it, though? _Blaise asked, whispering into his mind. _She's still the same person she was twenty minutes ago, you know._

_Uh, _yeah_, I kind of think it does_, Harry thought back, before shoving Blaise out of his head, uncomfortably reminded of (maybe) sleep-legilimising Riddle while he went and possessed Crouch.

And now he was thinking about _that_ again, which just... He groaned, letting his head fall back against the headboard with a dull _thunk_.

"So, are you going back to sleep?" Blaise asked. "Because I'm pretty awake, now, but I can go."

No. The only thing Harry really felt _sure_ of at the moment was that he _definitely_ wasn't going back to sleep. "You can stay. But do me a favor?"

"Hmm?"

"Put on some bloody _pants_, Blaise. _Please_." He _really _couldn't deal with trying not to look anywhere he really shouldn't be looking when he had so many other things to try not to think about at the same time.

Blaise just laughed at him, teasing fucking bastard.

* * *

"So," Severus said, looking from the ernest, convincingly concerned Zabini to the sullen, embarrassed Potter and back. "In sum, you believe that Potter somehow slipped into the Dark Lord's mind, in his _sleep_, from halfway around the bloody world, in some strange initial manifestation of his talent as a legilimens?"

Zabini nodded. "Basically, yes."

"You _do_ realise that Potter is far too sullen and puerile to be the Morrigan. Not to mention too _male_."

Potter obviously had no idea what Severus was talking about, because he clearly suspected he'd just been insulted. If he had ever heard of the Queen of Nightmares he would realise that, no matter how disparagingly Severus might phrase it, such a comparison was anything but an insult.

He had been skeptical when Zabini first told him the boy was a legilimens, but upon reflection he had decided that this development was not entirely surprising. He hadn't had the experience to notice at the time, but in hindsight, there was no way Lily's talent for manipulating people had been entirely natural. She hadn't been a proper mind mage — he certainly would have noticed _that_ — but he suspected she'd had just enough unconscious insight into the minds of those around her to portray herself as exactly the person they wanted to see in her, maybe encourage them to overlook some of the more egregious deviations from such a persona. Really, the ease with which she'd picked up Occlumency ought to have given it away. He simply hadn't realised at the time how unusual her intuitive grasp of the subject was because, well, after ten years in her company, he'd probably have been _more_ surprised if he'd introduced her to a new branch of magic and she _hadn't_ intuitively grasped the basic principles.

Magic had _liked_ Lily.

"I'm pretty sure the Morrigan could make you think she was a fourteen-year-old boy if she wanted to, but that is _so_ not the point. Look, just look at the memory, that's all I'm asking."

And then, if it turned out that Potter's legilimency _had_ manifested in the most impossible, ridiculous, _Potter-esque_ way it possibly could have, they would doubtless expect Severus to do something to fix it. Because, well... If he really had done what Zabini _thought_ he had done (impossible for at least three different reasons...assuming Potter wasn't _actually_ the Morrigan fucking with him) — which Severus had a sinking suspicion he had, if only because, well, Potters lived to make his life difficult, this was a verifiable _fact_ — someone _should _do _something_. Though Severus hadn't the faintest idea _what_.

He was going to have to come up with _something_, though, because if (when) the Dark Lord realised that there was some sort of...connection, between the two of them, he'd eat Lily's son alive. Possibly literally — the wraith had to be sustaining itself somehow, possessing creatures and subsuming their life-energy was Severus's most reasonable guess as to _how_.

"_Very well_," he muttered. "Potter?"

"Er, what?"

"The memory, Potter."

"Uh..."

"We haven't really done memory transfers yet. I figured it would be easier to wait until he'd come into his talent," Zabini explained.

Probably true, but hardly helpful. "_Fine_. Potter, I'm going to legilimise you to examine the memory. Don't fight me."

"But, what if I don't want—" the boy began, though he cut himself off as he felt Severus enter his mind, seeking the memory which _should_ be relatively near the surface of his thoughts, they _had _been talking about it for several minutes, now. _Get out of my head, Snape_, he thought furiously instead, making a valiant attempt to circumscribe Severus's presence, push him back out.

Not that it would _work_, Severus had been doing this longer than he'd been alive. He allowed the boy to push back the obtrusive projection, simultaneously slipping a far less substantial probe past his guard. Potter was, interestingly enough, clearly aware of its presence as well, though he couldn't quite manage to hold it well enough to trap him or repulse him entirely. Instead he resorted to snatching memories out of Severus's reach, blocking his attempts to reach the necessary incident with a looping chain of dark, cramped memories, one leading smoothly, almost indistinguishably to the next, a maze of... _Is this a bloody boot cupboard, Potter? _

The question prompted a related memory, though one which certainly wasn't intended to be part of the loop: Petunia Evans — _Dursley_ — shrieking at him, perhaps five or six years old, ordering him into the cupboard for some minor misbehavior or other. It was snatched away too quickly for Severus to determine exactly what his offence had been, but certainly not too quickly for him to orient himself, escape from the (mostly) disconnected loop into the boy's memory-structure proper.

_Fuck, you weren't supposed to see that!_

As though Severus wasn't fully aware of that muggle slag's abuses. He _had_ questioned her after Black had gone to examine the blood ward, after all.

The embarrassment that rippled through the boy's mind suggested he'd forgotten about that. This was followed by a few half-suppressed flashes of other memories he really didn't want Severus to see, the reasons, presumably, that he didn't want Severus in his mind at all, brought to the forefront of his consciousness by the very fact of Severus having caught a glimpse of one.

_I have no interest in your petty secrets, Potter. What part of my trying to help you do you not understand?_

_The part where you fucking hate me?_ the boy suggested, striking out at him, attempting to find the line between their minds.

Honestly? How had he _expected_ this meeting to proceed without allowing Severus to examine the incident?

_What are you— Fucking _ow_, Harry!_ Zabini snapped, as the ill-focused attack entirely failed to distinguish Severus from the background noise of his mind, but found a lingering connection to the other young legilimens quite easily. _Someone once told me it's rude, lurking invisibly_, he 'said', presumably in defense of his having been caught. Which it _was_, but that was hardly the issue at hand.

_Someone also told you that lurking is rude in general, Zabini._

_Oh. My. God. If you two are going to argue, do it in Blaise's head! _

_We're not arguing. Who's arguing? I was just going to say, he doesn't hate _you_, he—_

Severus, unlike Potter, was fully capable of expelling an invader from his consciousness. He himself, unfortunately, had a job to do before he could return to his own mind-space, happily ignoring Potter's existence, so far as such a thing was possible.

_Potter, if you don't stop faffing about, I _will _hunt down _every _memory you _least _want me to see in pursuit of the only one of any interest to me whatsoever._

Resignation echoed through the boy's mind, envisioned walls appearing around Severus's disembodied form, a doorless, windowless corridor leading to a single memory.

A memory which, when Severus approached it, appeared to be exactly what Zabini had thought. Harry Potter, blessed or cursed with all of _both _his parents' capacity for driving Severus mad, had somehow managed to fall into the Dark Lord's mind, as though a madman on the other side of the bloody _planet_ was, somehow, the closest, most convenient mind for his own wandering consciousness to fall into. _While unconscious._

Severus withdrew, finding himself face to scowling, petulant face with a very familiar glare. "Damn it, Potter," he muttered. "Only you..." He sighed, trying to focus.

"So, I take it I was right?"

"Yeah," Potter said, caught between horror and resignation. Ha. At least he was equally aware of the absurdity that was his life.

"I _knew_ it!"

_Not exactly the sort of thing I want to celebrate, you smug bastard_, Potter projected loudly, accompanied by a two-fingered salute in Zabini's direction.

"Sorry, sorry. So, Snape, what do we do now?"

Well, that _was _the question, wasn't it? There was a veritable _slew_ of things _Severus_ ought to do, in preparation for the Dark Lord's now-inevitable return — Barty was supposed to be _dead_, damn it! But as he unmistakably _wasn't_, and he _was_ one of the more brilliant, resourceful young Death Eaters, it was only a matter of time until he managed to restore their Lord to power... But none of those had anything to do with the pressing issue of Harry bloody Potter unconsciously invading Riddle's mind.

"Firstly, you continue to practice your occlumency, Potter. Your attempt to repel me was not poorly done, but certainly not up to the task of protecting your mind from the Dark Lord, should he realise the existence of the apparent connection between you."

"Er...thanks?"

"No need to sound so surprised, Potter. I do give credit where it is due." It was hardly _Severus's_ fault that Potter so rarely managed to earn it. "In case you missed the second half of that evaluation, however, the _pertinent _bit was that your defenses are far from adequate."

"...Right. But. Even if I do get good enough at occlumency to...keep him out, or even you...I was _asleep_. How am I supposed to do occlumency while I'm unconscious?"

Well, that was the question, wasn't it? Really, the issue was more one of _not_ doing legilimency, but the problem was ultimately the same — and not entirely unheard of in other young legilimens, though most dreamwalkers tended to meander into the minds of those who were physically nearest to them, with a slight preference for those with whom they were most familiar, much as they would if they had been awake whilst allowing their minds to wander. Since this sort of behavior was entirely subconscious, dreamwalkers tended to invade other unconscious minds, as they were generally foiled by even the most basic habitual occlumency.

Generally, the solution to this particular issue was to use specialised wards or amulets to limit the degree to which one's mind might stray in sleep, preventing the dreamwalker from coming into contact with other minds they might wander into, but physical distance didn't seem to be a factor in this case, which meant that the connection between the boy and the Dark Lord would not be limited by such facile methods. Barring that, most legilimens (barring those with certain psychological issues) grew out of dreamwalking around the same time they managed to stop straying into others' minds while awake, presumably because their conscious habits carried over into their subconscious. But Riddle would almost certainly realise that someone had a back door into his mind well before Potter reached that degree of unconscious self-control. It had taken _Severus_ nearly six months to cease accidentally wandering into Lily's mind (which had been rather disturbing for multiple reasons), and he'd had _far_ more self-control than her son even then.

Which simply left...some method of maintaining a sufficient degree of consciousness to catch one's mind wandering, and withdraw immediately.

"Lucid dreaming." It was really the only reasonable solution to attempt, and had the added benefit of being a relatively easy skill to master, once one had the initial knack for it.

"Er...what?"

"Learning to control your dreams," Zabini explained. "I hear it's almost like being awake, but because you're in your own dream, you can do whatever you want. Like, godlike powers to _break the laws of magic_ whatever you want."

"What, seriously?"

Zabini nodded. "Sounds cool, right?"

"Er, _yeah_, how've you never mentioned this before?"

The other boy shrugged. "Didn't think of it. I can't do it, so it's not like I think about it very often."

"Oh." Potter suddenly sounded very disappointed, though he did an admirable job of keeping the psychic manifestation of the emotion to himself. "So, it's really difficult, then?"

"Er, no, not really, I don't think? It's just, well, you kind of have to have _dreams _to have _lucid_ dreams."

"Everybody dreams, Blaise," Potter said, with a certainty reminiscent of Granger quoting a textbook.

"I don't."

"Are you seriously telling me you don't remember _ever_ having a single dream?"

Zabini shrugged, throwing a helpless look at Severus. (Purely for the show of it, he expected.) "No, I don't. And yes, I know that's weird."

"Yeah, but, you know, sometimes that bears repeating. Because you're _really _weird."

"Potter, stop flirting." Severus only barely managed to maintain his habitual frown as the boy went positively _scarlet_. Zabini flipped him off behind Potter's back, glaring furiously, which was nearly equally amusing, especially since Severus was fairly certain that this would in no way impair the development of their..._relationship_. (Personally, he didn't see the appeal, but the idea of Zabini playing nursemaid to Potter's myriad insecurities was vastly preferable to the alternative of his being co-opted to direct and aid in Black's antics, so he did theoretically support said..._relationship_.) If anything, knowing that even _Severus_ was aware of his fancy might encourage the idiot to pull his head out of his arse and _do_ something about it. "Lucid dreaming is not an especially difficult skill. I will send you a book on the subject. The first step in the approach most people find reliably effective is to record your dreams, though it can also be helpful arranging to be woken at random intervals, as most people tend only to remember their most recent dream before waking. It would behoove you to begin practicing _immediately_."

"Er. Right."

"See, I told you he wouldn't be an arse about it," Zabini said — a lead-in, Severus was certain, to an attempt to discomfit him in turn. No doubt a reference to his relationship with Lily was forthcoming.

"Language, Zabini. And it would hardly do to discourage one of the few instances of responsible behavior demonstrated by any Gryffindor." Really, if he could find a way to compel Potter to bring all Riddle-related issues — or even potentially life-threatening issues in _general_ — to him rather than running off and doing something near-suicidally _stupid_ in an attempt to resolve said problems himself, Severus thought he might.

"Oh, yes, I'm sure it has nothing to do with this _clearly _being a Lily problem, not just Harry being a complete _Potter_."

_Of course. Predictable, Zabini._

"What the hell is _that_ supposed to mean?"

"Well, Snape was like, school-boy arch-nemeses with your father, but there's no way he can blame you being a legilimens or having some weird connection to Riddle on _him_. _He_ wasn't the one fucking around with soul magic when you were a baby, and the Potters don't have any legilimens in their family tree for, like, six generations. Which just leaves your mum. And Snape _liked_ Lily. So he really can't be _too_ annoyed about all this, even if it does mean he has to deal with us over hols."

"Surely my lack of overt annoyance could have _nothing_ to do with receiving advanced warning of the Dark Lord's imminent return. Barty Crouch _was_ one of the more intelligent of my cohort, and one of the most loyal to Riddle personally, rather than the Cause, even _before_ being sent to Azkaban and then held captive by his own father for untold years. If he somehow _fails_ to return Riddle to a body, and thence to power in his quest for revenge against Crouch Senior and the British government at large, I would be _shocked_. It truly is now a matter of _when_ he returns, not _if_."

As though they hadn't been sufficiently _fucked_ with Bella's escape. Though, to be fair, he'd yet to receive any word indicating that she'd left the veela, so perhaps she'd decided to lie low for the time being. Stranger things had happened. Delacour seemed to be under the impression she had no intention of attempting to return Riddle to power herself, for example. (Though that really only meant that she and Riddle were _separate_ incredibly dangerous threats to be concerned with.)

"Nah, I'm sticking with this one _clearly_ being on Evans."

"I recommend the two of you keep each other company for the next few nights, until Potter gets into the habit of documenting his dreams."

Potter went _very _red again. Zabini pouted at him. "Now you're just being mean."

He was, yes. _Well spotted_. "It _is _the summer holiday, you can hardly expect to be treated with the same consideration as when you are legitimately my responsibility."

"Er...so. I just...need to start writing down my dreams?" Potter said, making a valiant attempt to force the subject away from his blatantly obvious interest, and Zabini's equally obvious disinclination to do anything about it.

Severus nodded. "In as much detail as possible, the theory being that you will begin to pay more attention to your dreams, thus attaining a greater degree of consciousness within them. If Zabini is unable to wake you at random intervals, I'm certain Black will be more than willing to do so." Potter, rather unexpectedly, grew even _more_ awkward at that suggestion. Even _more_ unexpectedly, Zabini did as well. Significantly less-so, but still. Severus gave the two of them a put-upon sigh. "Do I even want to know?" (He did, especially if Black had managed to do something that made _Zabini_ uncomfortable.)

"I..._may_ have told Harry Dumbledore's theory about Lyra's origins," Zabini explained.

Of course he had. Severus had mentioned it months ago, and the boy had decided that as the only truly _reasonable _explanation anyone had come up with for Lyra Black's existence and the fact that she was very clearly the same person as Bellatrix, it would be her final cover story. Anyone who managed to poke a hole in that one _deserved_ to know that she was a bloody time traveller from an alternate dimension and the year 1963. (Severus had gotten the impression that Zabini was becoming a bit annoyed with Black's inability to keep her story straight.)

"She's, um... Okay, you knew Lestrange, right? Is Lyra...actually her clone?"

_No, but it would make sense, wouldn't it? _"Albus Dumbledore is many things, Potter, but he's not an idiot. That Bellatrix created Lyra using blood alchemy and arranged for her to be raised by some associate on the continent as an heir to her natal House _is_ the most logical explanation for her existence." This did not seem to reassure the boy. Understandably, Severus supposed. He had _heard _of Bellatrix, obviously. "Just ask."

"Is she, um... That is, if Lyra is...basically the same person as Lestrange, does that mean she's, ah...insane?"

Severus just raised an eyebrow at that patently _ridiculous _question. _Of course_ Black was insane, even _Potter _couldn't _possibly _have overlooked that — she'd _faked his death_ only two weeks ago.

"You know what I— Like...mass-murdering insane, not just normal Lyra insane." The words were accompanied by an echo of concern for...Hermione Granger?

Severus suppressed a groan. If this was going where he _thought_ it was going... He wasn't entirely unaware of the relationship between Granger and the junior Bellatrix (much as he might _wish_ to be). Granger was nearly as obvious about her (conflicted) infatuation as was Potter, and Bellatrix, while largely oblivious to the nature of Granger's affections, was clearly partial to the muggleborn's company and therefore unlikely to rebuff her inevitable romantic advances. In the all too likely event that Miss Granger _didn't_ realise the folly of such a relationship the first time Bellatrix inadvertently made her cry over some inane teenage drama, they would probably end up taking over Magical Britain within ten years.

"Given the degree of effort Miss Black has been known to put into limiting the collateral damage caused by her pranks, one can only assume that whoever raised her was a better influence than those who raised Bellatrix." Never mind that Granger was almost certainly safe from Black, in any case — Bellatrix was _very _loyal, after her own fashion. Anyone Granger happened to have a _problem_ with, on the other hand...

(Minerva McGonagall appearing in her tartan night-dress at Severus's door to complain about the junior Bellatrix breaking into her rooms — to threaten her over the Weasley girl's sleeping arrangements, supposedly at Granger's behest — was one of the funniest things he had ever seen. Especially since he hadn't the slightest idea what she'd expected _him_ to do about it, he had actually been on Weasley's side in that little contest of wills. Doubly so since he was quite certain Granger hadn't intended for Black to go _threaten Minerva_ when she'd asked her to solve Weasley's problem.)

"That wasn't a _no_," Potter pointed out.

"Come off it, Harry, I already told you they aren't the same person, really."

"Yeah, but you didn't actually _know_ Lestrange."

"_No_, but you _do_ know Lyra. Do you think she would just go around killing people for the fun of it?"

"Well _no_, but she _does_ kill giant talking spiders for fun, and she _has_ suggested killing people before, and the more I think about it the more I think she might have actually been serious about that."

"Yeah, well, the Dursleys are abusive twats, so."

"That's _not_ the point, Blaise!"

"It is, actually," Severus intervened. "It is hardly as though Bellatrix became a murderer through a psychotic break. Miss Black has thus far limited herself to acting out her more destructive tendencies on targets which are largely socially acceptable. She is unlikely, I think, to decide to kill a human without a very good excuse, or permission from someone she considers a reference for socially acceptable behaviour. Riddle is by far the greater threat, and the one upon which you should be focused."

"Lyra's on our side, she's not a threat at all," Zabini corrected him. Inaccurately — Bellatrix was _always _a threat, her primary loyalty being to _Chaos_, rather than any mortal 'side'.

But Severus was not inclined to argue the point. "In any case, you have more imminent problems to deal with. Continue to practice your occlumency, begin cataloguing your dreams as soon as possible, and send your owl to me tomorrow morning to pick up that book."

Potter nodded. "Yes, sir. Er...thank you."

An unsolicited honorific _and_ an expression of gratitude? Would wonders never cease! Severus nodded back. "Very well, then. If you have no more relevant questions — regarding _Riddle_, not Miss Black — there are other matters I must attend to today," he announced, rising to leave. Like start brushing up on his dueling skills, and find some way to alert Dumbledore to Barty's survival and current course of action, preferably _without_ alerting him to the fact that Potter apparently had some sort of soul magic connection to the disembodied Dark Lord.

"Of course," Zabini said quickly, obviously recognising that Severus's patience for this discussion was at an end. "Thank you for meeting with us. I'll see you out, sir."

* * *

_So the first scene here takes place around 8 July, and the meeting with Sev is on 10 July, just a couple of days before Dora runs into Sev brushing up on his fighting skills._

_FYI, Severus completely fails to come up with any reason that he could possibly know about Barty's survival and his tracking down Voldie without telling him about Harry's connection to Riddle. —Leigha_

_It still amuses me that Severus and Harry have pretty much the same exact opinion about Lyra and Hermione's relationship. —Lysandra_


	17. You've been engaged this whole time!

"By the way, have you talked to Harry about the Tournament yet?"

Ordinarily, someone appearing out of thin air, in a _locked room_, and smoothly talking as though this _weren't_ entirely unprompted and out of nowhere, would have startled Harry to say the least. He might have jumped for his wand, demanded to know how the hell they got in here or what they thought they were doing, barging in on a private conversation. But he did none of those, just let out a thin sigh.

After all, Lyra just did things like this. Interrogating her over it wouldn't do any good.

Though, he _did_ wonder how she pulled this shite off. It wasn't apparation — it was completely silent, for one, and went through wards like they weren't even there. She said it was shadow-walking, but it couldn't possibly be...could it? He meant, shadow magic was _really_ dark. Not dark in the evil, blood sacrifice, truly _harmful_ sense, just, _magically_ dark. Harry had asked Hermione about it, and she'd said shadow magic was _very_ obscure, one of those things humans simply couldn't do, or at least not very well. It was mostly just seen from vampires and demons. Which...well, Harry wasn't as confident Lyra was a normal human being as he'd once been, but he was _positive_ she wasn't a vampire. Demons, he didn't know enough about demons to say one way or the other, but...

Hermione _had_ been entirely unsurprised when Harry had told her Lyra was apparently practising shadow magic, which meant she'd probably known that already. Either _she_ knew Lyra was a demon or something — she did seem the most likely person to know, since she and Lyra were officially a thing as of about a week ago, apparently (and yes, he still found that thought vaguely concerning) — or she simply accepted Lyra doing _insane, impossible_ things because it was Lyra doing them, which...

Well, to be honest, Harry could understand how someone might just give up eventually. Lyra seemed to have very little respect for what was or was not impossible or reasonable.

Blaise, of course, being about as accustomed to Lyra being Lyra as Hermione was by now, answered her just as smoothly and casually. "Everybody knows it's _happening_, obviously, but I really don't know how much you know about it." He turned to Harry then, a single questioning eyebrow ticking up.

Harry was only slightly mollified by Blaise choosing to not talk about him like he wasn't here. "We _were_ in the middle of something, you know."

While Blaise's mind had retreated the instant they'd been interrupted, he was still open enough for Harry to pick up his...affectionate exasperation, he guessed he'd put it — and yes, Harry knew there was really no point in calling out Lyra for being a crazy, intrusive bitch, but he was still going to do it anyway. "Yes, Lyra, what _did_ we say about locked doors?"

"I can't very well be expected to respect the implicit message if I don't know it's locked — there's no way to tell from shadows, you know." Lyra frowned. "At least, _I_ can't, there might be a way to feel out that sort of thing, but I'm not quite good enough to pick it up yet if there is." The implication that she certainly _would_ be good enough eventually was obvious on her voice. "Anyway, I've already interrupted your mind-fucking session, so you may as well answer the bloody question."

Harry managed to control his reaction to that _particular_ way to refer to Blaise's continued mind magic lessons. At least, he was pretty sure he did — that low-simmering amusement from Blaise suggested he'd picked up on it, but Lyra hadn't broken into that smug grin of hers, so it probably wasn't on his face, legilimency was just fucking cheating.

Since he was a bit preoccupied mastering himself, Blaise spoke first. "I suppose so. What about the Tournament is so urgent, anyway? It's still months away, and it's not like any of us will be participating."

A sly little smirk crossed Lyra's face at that last bit, but she didn't voice whatever it was she was thinking. (Harry still got a bad feeling anyway.) "Meda reminded me that the Yule Ball is a thing, and Harry wasn't likely taught how to dance properly. Or was she wrong?" she asked, turning to him.

Which, as trivial as it was, that she was actually asking _him_ had Harry's Lyra-induced annoyance (a very familiar feeling by now) tick down a few notches. "No, I never learned how to dance. Why would I have?" He didn't quite manage to keep the scorn off his own voice, but he wasn't really trying either — honestly, _dancing_ was so far away from his own priorities it hadn't even been on the list. "And why does it matter now?"

Lyra gave him that flat, uncomprehending look of hers, the same one he got every time he said something she thought was unbelievably stupid. "Because of the Yule Ball? You _are_ the only Potter left, I figured it wasn't in your best interests to give everyone the impression Lord Potter is a thoughtless, boorish arse, but, that's your business, I guess."

Before Harry could ask what the hell _that_ was supposed to mean, Blaise was saying, "It's a Triwizard Tournament tradition, Harry. The Yule Ball is basically one of those high society parties Sirius was complaining about the other day — not quite the same, since it's open to all the students, but most of the same expectations apply." At the same time, Blaise reached a finger into Harry's head, tugged at a specific memory. One of the first extended conversations he and Blaise had ever had, where he'd asked for help with occlumency, and things had quickly grown _very_ uncomfortable.

At some point, Harry had asked why the hell Lyra was so obsessed with teaching him all this...proper noble shite, whatever — as a distraction from the topic of life at the Dursleys and how it'd sort of fucked him up a little bit, a transparently _obvious_ one, which was slightly embarrassing in retrospect. But anyway, Blaise had explained how properly playing the stupid society game led to wealth and influence, which led to power, which directly translated to the ability to live his life however he damn well pleased. (Which, that was _also_ embarrassing in retrospect, that should have been pretty fucking obvious.) Since Harry hadn't had any interest in proper manners or politics or whatnot, Lyra had gotten the message that he didn't _want_ control over his own life which was, admittedly, completely incomprehensible.

Blaise didn't spell it out, but that was more than enough to get across what he was trying to say.

Forcing out a heavy sigh, Harry's eyes tipped up to the ceiling. He _still_ thought all this shite was bloody _stupid_, he couldn't possibly understand why people cared about this nonsense, but he _did_ get it. As tedious as playing along with the nobility's expectations would be, it _did_ benefit him in the long run — sort of like studying mind magic, or dueling, or learning to do a patronus, just with things that had no immediately obvious use of their own. "Alright, fine. I guess I have some more horribly boring lessons about manners and stuff to look forward to, don't I?"

Lyra let out a high giggle. Falling into an empty armchair — bonelessly flopping sideways across it, of course, because Lyra couldn't possibly use furniture as it was intended — she said, "Yes, that you do. It could be worse, the person _I_ learned this shite from was such a bitch, you don't even know. You're getting off easy with me and the Zabinis for tutors, really."

Harry didn't even try to hold in a scoff.

"Anyway, of all the things we _could_ be going over, dancing _really_ isn't that bad. It can even be kind of fun sometimes, if you do it right. There is some formal comportment stuff, I guess, but we should probably wait for Sirius for that — I was obviously taught feminine manners, and you'd probably get some weird looks if you went around acting like a proper young lady."

Blaise chuckled, because he was a hypocritical berk like that — Harry wasn't an idiot, he didn't have to know a load of noble society arsehole stuff to notice Blaise's own mannerisms were actually rather feminine, especially when he bothered to be all formal and proper. (Of course, he _also_ knew from mind magic lessons that this was because Blaise had mostly picked up this stuff imitating Mira and Daphne; neither of them had bothered to correct him, Mira because she'd hardly noticed, and Daphne just thought it was hilarious.) "Maybe a good idea. Sirius is a bit...flamboyant, but I think that's just a Black thing, I'm sure he learned the rules before deciding to break them all the time."

"Well, you do need to know what the rules are before you can break them properly," Lyra said, as though this should be obvious.

Which, it sort of was. Blaise had explained before how Lyra carefully walked the line _just_ on the edge of seriously offensive, taunting people without giving them an actual good excuse to call her out on it. Though, if Harry did the same thing, he'd probably get into trouble she wouldn't. Lyra was a huge fucking cheater, but it also helped that she was a Black — the Ancient Houses could get away with things other nobles couldn't, just by virtue of the prestige associated with being one of the Seventeen Founders of the Wizengamot. The Blacks were rather infamous for using this license to do whatever they bloody well felt like, and telling the other noble families to go fuck themselves if they didn't like it.

(It was very possible the rest of the nobility had been relieved when they'd thought the House of Black had died forever.)

"But anyway, it'd help if you had any idea who you'd be going with. If nothing else, you can practice this shite with them, just so it'll be more natural when the actual event comes around."

"Oh, well..." In another situation, Harry imagined he would find the need to get _a date_ to a _bloody ball_ rather...terrifying? That didn't seem the right word, since it wasn't nearly on the level of things like Dark Lords and basilisks, but something in the same category, anyway. But, well, it _was_ just ridiculous social obligation stuff, and he _did_ actually know more people now than he had a year ago, that did smooth things over a bit. In fact, he hardly hesitated a second before turning to Blaise. "Do you want to, um..." He didn't quite finish the sentence, because he abruptly realised he was _asking Blaise on a date_, and _what the fuck was he doing_...

He might have expected that damn smirk, for Blaise to say something about that being very smooth, Potter, he set new standards for articulate...ness... Whatever, something snide and Slytherin-ish. (Harry didn't really mind the teasing Blaise and his friends did all the time, not nearly as much as he pretended to, it _was_ funny.) But instead he winced, his eyes ducking away from Harry's. "I, ah, can't."

Well, _that_ wasn't an answer Harry had expected. "What? Why not?"

Blaise actually _hesitated_, looking more uncomfortable than Harry thought he'd ever seen him — which was just bloody _strange_ — so Lyra answered first. "He's going with Daphne, obviously."

"_What?_" For maybe two seconds Harry thought Blaise and Daphne were dating and he'd _somehow_ never noticed, and Blaise had _somehow_ never thought to tell him, but he quickly realised a serious problem with that, and he was just very confused. "But, er, isn't Daphne...you know, gay? I thought she and Tracey were dating now..."

"Oh, she is, and they are. Which is kind of funny, actually, the rumour is Daphne's mum exclusively prefers women too — apparently it's hereditary."

That was a funny thing for _Lyra_ to say, when he thought about it. There was Lyra herself, of course, with her thing with Hermione, and Sirius obviously didn't give a single shite which sex his partners were, Lestrange had been rather (in)famously involved with Mira, most people assumed Sirius's brother Regulus had been very gay... Harry had even heard a few rumours about Narcissa Malfoy, and if he didn't know about the _wanking to a picture of his mum_ thing, he'd've said that _Draco_ Malfoy's picture was in the dictionary next to _homosexual_. Clearly if _any_ family had the gene, it was the Blacks.

Hell, Harry was pretty sure he wasn't exactly...normal, when it came to this stuff either. Maybe it was just because he wasn't quite fourteen, so didn't know what he was talking about, and he hadn't even kissed anyone yet (except Lyra that one time, which shouldn't count), and still didn't really know what he was doing. But, when he thought about it, he didn't...get it? He meant, he didn't entirely understand why which sex someone was should matter. It hardly even clicked to him, to be honest. Sure, he _noticed_ that pretty people were pretty, and he did get, er, sexy thoughts, but it was never really...he didn't...

Oh, he didn't know what he was trying to say, this shite was confusing.

But anyway, they were supposed to be having an uncomfortable conversation. "But, then, why are you and Daphne going together?" He _might_ have said, well, not wanting people to know, but in the last couple months at school Daphne and Tracey had made no effort to hide it, and they were _far_ from the only gay couple around — as far as Harry could tell, mages just didn't make nearly as big of a deal of this stuff as muggles did.

Lyra, again, jumped in before Blaise could answer. "Because they're betrothed? I mean, they _could_ go with other people, but if they did it would be politically problematic, to say the least."

"They're _what?"_

Wincing again, Blaise said, "Thank you, Lyra, that certainly wasn't news I might have wanted to break carefully, or anything."

Lyra blinked at him for a second, before turning back to Harry. "Did you not already know that? Um. Oops?"

"But, wait, if Daphne doesn't even _like_ blokes and they're not, you know, together, then why the _hell_ are they getting married?"

If anything, that _perfectly reasonable_ question just seemed to make Lyra confused. "Er... I could have sworn we already talked about this. At Zee's wedding?"

"Er...no?"

"I distinctly remember talking about Zee and the Future Late Mr. Zabini not even living together."

"Yeah, and I still think that's weird, but what the hell does that have to do with Blaise and Daphne?"

"What do you mean, what the hell does it have to do— I mean, you do know what marriage _is_, right?"

"Ignore Lyra, Harry," Blaise said, sounding oddly tired and exasperated, "she's simply not going to understand the question. To put it very simply, magical Britain has a much more...traditional mindset when it comes to family and marriage. Certainly among the nobility, and most of the commons too, arranged marriages are still the norm. To many mages, the idea of marrying for love is completely foreign."

"Marrying for— People do that? As in, in real life, not just in stories?"

"Yes, Lyra, people do that." Blaise rolled his eyes, lifted a shoulder in a lazy shrug. "See what I mean, completely foreign."

"How does that even _work_, though?"

"You could ask Tonks — she _did_ run away from an Ancient House to marry a muggleborn, she's sort of the expert."

"Is that what that was? I mean, I always thought there was more to it than that. I'm pretty sure Meda really just wanted to get away from the Family, and Menelaus Parkinson is _criminally _dull. Plus she and Tonks do make a _very_ good team, I assumed she had _some_ good reasons for doing things the way she did. Just, making a critically important decision that will permanently alter the course of the rest of your life _because feelings_, that's just...mind-numbingly stupid."

An odd look crossed Blaise's face, something in Harry's sense of him tense but amused, but he didn't really care about that right now. Raising his voice a bit to cut through whatever one of them might be about to say, Harry said, "Wait, so, you've been _engaged to Daphne_ this whole time, and you never told me?"

"It's not really your business, is it?"

Blaise shot Lyra a glare. "Could you shut up for five minutes? You're not helping."

"Fine, fine, I'll be good."

Somehow, Harry didn't believe it.

Slowly, almost painfully, Blaise turned back to Harry, an awkward little smile twitching at his lips. "She's saying it in the most bitchy way possible, but she's not..._entirely_ wrong. _Technically_, Daphne and I aren't betrothed _yet_, but our parents have already come to an agreement on it — it is going to happen, it just isn't official yet. And, the culture around this sort of thing among the nobility, it isn't appropriate to go blabbing about it before it's official. You can _imply_ it, sure. You might have noticed Daphne and her parents were seated with the family at Mira's last wedding, we've been invited to a few Greengrass things, just, that's sort of telling people without telling people, if you get what I mean.

"Honestly," Blaise said, wincing a little, "it, er, sort of slipped my mind that you wouldn't know about these things already. How marriage is done here, I mean. It's the default assumption to most British mages, not something that needs to be explained, and I just...forgot. Sorry."

If he couldn't feel Blaise's frustration with himself, his general discomfort with this whole topic, Harry might have been rather more annoyed than he was. He _was_ annoyed — he really felt _being engaged_ was the sort of thing that should come up (and, everyone getting engaged at fifteen, honestly, purebloods sometimes) — but he just... No matter how irritating it was, the explanation of _why_ it'd never come up was understandable. _Stupid_, but understandable.

And, it wasn't like it had _really_ been a secret: Harry had already known Blaise and Daphne were close. He'd just thought they were...really, _really_ close friends. More like siblings than anything...which did make sense, since they'd met when they were, like, _four_. In fact, it'd been quite intimidating, when he'd learned a bit more about their relationship early in their mind magic lessons, that... Well, Blaise could be _very_ intense when it came to the (few) people he cared about. Harry had observed at the time that Blaise would do pretty much anything for Daphne, if he thought it was necessary, with very little thought.

He distinctly recalled feeling certain Blaise would kill for her and not even blink.

Which was sort of scary, yes, but it wasn't even that..._unique_, he guessed. Because Blaise _was_ very intense sometimes — Harry thought it would be more difficult to come up with any friend of his he _wouldn't_ go to extreme lengths for in the proper situation. And it wasn't just Blaise, Harry had recently become _quite_ aware of just how...unnerving, the people around him could be. Sirius had attempted to kill someone in revenge for betraying Harry's parents, and he didn't doubt he must have killed people in the war (which he'd mostly just joined for James in the first place). Lyra had not-so-subtly offered to kill the Dursleys for him. Hell, even _Hermione_, she'd _set a professor on fire_ for him way back in _first year_ — Harry could easily imagine her doing _very_ extreme things if she thought the situation called for it (and he didn't entirely trust her to judge whether or not it did).

Honestly, when it came down to it...Harry thought he might be the same. He was used to not having or needing things, but... The very few people that he _did_ care about, if push came to shove, if his hand was forced, Harry was absolutely certain he'd do what he had to for his friends. Even _acquaintances_, honestly — back in second year, he'd gone into the Chamber fully willing to do whatever he had to to get Ginny out of there alive, and he'd hardly known her at all at the time. (Not that they were all that close now either, but certainly more than a year ago.) All this occlumency stuff, it was making it _far_ more difficult to lie to himself, and he knew, he couldn't really judge Blaise and the others much for their...ruthlessness. He was much the same, just quieter about it.

He couldn't ignore the fact that, when Lyra _had_ offered to kill the Dursleys for him, his biggest objection was that he didn't want her to get in trouble for it. That said a lot about himself, when he thought about it.

Sometimes he remembered, how a few people had commented that he looked a lot like his father, but his personality was more like his mother's. By this point he knew most of what people had told him about Lily had been complete shite, but he wondered if they hadn't nailed it anyway.

So, in a way, Blaise _apparently_ being engaged to Daphne didn't actually change anything. Not really. He meant, it wasn't like... He didn't know, in a way Harry had already known they were close, and Daphne was still _very_ gay, it didn't make a real difference.

And besides, it wasn't like Blaise didn't still go around snogging people in broom cupboards anyway.

(_No, Harry, bad, stop thinking about Blaise and snogging..._)

"Um, so..." Harry desperately tried to wrench around back to the original topic of conversation, ignore all those weird, confusing, conflicted thoughts for a moment. (Though occlumency made just not thinking about things much harder too.) "I have to find a date for this stupid thing, is what you're saying. Since you're going with Daphne." Harry noticed the suggestion in what he'd just said, but he decided to pretend he _hadn't_ just implied that, obviously, if he was looking to date someone Blaise came to mind first, come on, that wasn't a thing that was happening in his head at all right now.

Thankfully, the other two ignored it themselves — more likely, Lyra simply hadn't noticed, but Blaise decided to not tease him this time, at least. "I'm sorry, yeah. It doesn't have to be a date in the sense of _dating_ date, you know. It's perfectly ordinary for people to go to these sorts of events with friends, or cousins or whatever. With _some_ society events it'd be peculiar — the Festa Morgana, for example, is tied to a much older tradition that, well, generally couples there are married or courting, long story short — but for something like the Yule Ball it's fine."

Going with a cousin wasn't really an option for Harry, since the only one he had available was Lyra, and she would presumably go with Hermione (assuming they hadn't violently imploded by then). He guessed..._maybe_ Justin, but he could still be rather...muggle-ish, sometimes, Harry honestly had absolutely no idea if he'd be at all comfortable going to a dance with a bloke, so asking would just be...uncomfortable. Not to mention, he had a suspicion that Justin fancied Gin. "Oh, wait, if Daphne's going with you, would Tracey work, then? I mean, if I really _have_ to go, she'd be fine..." Tracey could be a bit...much, but she wasn't awful company or anything.

One of Blaise's eyebrows ticked up, looking _far_ too Snape-ish. "Sure, maybe, you could ask. I wouldn't put it quite that way when you do, though."

"Why does it matter how I put it? I mean, it's not like she _cares_, she knows what it'll be about and she's with Daphne anyway."

"If a friend walked up to you and invited you to something, saying they didn't really _want_ to but they had to go with _somebody_, and you might as well do, how would you feel about that?"

...Good point. "Er...right. So, um...was that it, then?" He meant, if he was supposed to be practicing this high society nonsense with his date, it stood to reason that he should wait until he'd asked someone, at _least_. Which meant that this wasn't _nearly _as urgent as Lyra had made it out to be when she'd first interrupted. He glared at her.

"_Oh_, no." She gave him a smile which he couldn't help but feel looked a bit sadistic. "Tracey already knows how to dance. In fact, pretty much _anyone_ you could reasonably ask probably already knows how to do a _waltz_ at _least_. So, unless you want whoever you ask to rescind their acceptance when they realise that _yes_ means they have to go through the awkward, stepping-on-toes part of teaching you to dance, you need to at least learn the basics. And the sooner you start practicing, the better. You didn't have plans today, did you?"

_It'll be faster and easier to just go along with it_, Blaise thought at him. Compared to arguing with her about the necessity of starting lessons _today_, or whether spending the afternoon practicing legilimency really counted as _plans_, Harry presumed.

He sighed, putting as much exasperation and annoyance into the exhalation as he could. "What do I have to do, then?"

Lyra grinned. "Come on, Blaise, get up, he should see what it's supposed to look like first."

"Why do I have a suspicion that you're one of those obnoxious girls who insists on leading?" he asked, hauling himself to his feet. Probably rhetorically, since Lyra just smirked at him and flicked her wand, quiet classical music suddenly filling the air around them.

"Right, so, the first step in pretty much every dance you _really _need to know is you stepping forward with your left foot, while your partner steps _back_ with her _right_ foot — this is a waltz, by the way—"

Blaise cut her off, sniggering. "You're _terrible_ at this. Harry, ignore Lyra — the _first _thing you do, after asking her for the dance, which is one of those things you should ask Sirius about, is get into position..."

Harry sighed again. This was going to be a _long_ afternoon, he could already tell.


	18. To Snog or Not to Snog

The elevator bell _dinged_, startling Sirius out of his reverie, trying to recall exactly how he'd gotten to the bed he'd woken up in about twenty minutes before. He was pretty sure the woman had been called...Jessica? And her boyfriend was... Honestly, Sirius had just been thinking of him as Surfer Dude, pretty much the only things he'd managed to catch about him in the course of the (short) conversation they'd had at the bar before adjourning to the couple's flat were that Surfer Dude was a surfer — er...Jennifer? was an aspiring actress, he thought — and he liked to watch.

Which was absolutely fine with Sirius, he'd never been shy about...anything, really. He vaguely recalled agreeing to let Surfer Dude take pictures, actually. Which was also fine, though if there were going to be photos of his naked arse banging some random muggle chick out there in the world, he kind of wanted copies. Maybe he should have asked for their telephone number, it hadn't occurred to him until he'd gotten halfway home that that was a thing muggles did. In his defense, he hadn't had a hangover potion on him. Which meant _yes_, his head _was_ pounding at the moment. The sun was far too bright and everyone was so _loud_ and _awake_. _Speaking of which.._. He threw a spell at the kitchen windows, tinting them obsidian-grey and blocking out a _significant_ part of his headache.

He was acutely aware that he'd gotten old at some point, because _before _Azkaban, he'd've thought nothing of going straight from a night like that to being on-duty with a Sober-Up and ten minutes' notice. Moody had warned him, back then, that this would happen eventually, all dismissive and condescending, but Sirius had known he'd just been miffed _he_ couldn't party like a twenty-year-old. Well, that and that Sirius didn't have anything like a proper degree of paranoia for a second-year Auror. To which Sirius had always smirked and pointed out that life was nasty and brutish and short, and every night should be lived like they might die tomorrow, because, well, they _might_.

Gods and Powers, he'd been such a little _shite_.

He should look Moody up, when he got back to Britain, he decided, heating water for coffee. He thought there was still...

He turned to the cold-box — he was pretty sure that there had been half a bag of ground coffee beans in there — and nearly bowled over Harry. _Christ_ that kid was quiet! He managed to spin out of the way at the last second, albeit rather clumsily, losing his balance and stumbling into the counter. "Morning!"

_Fuck, why am I so _loud_?!_ Seriously, it shouldn't be possible to be so hung over that _his own voice_ hurt his head. Maybe Zee had a spare hangover potion in her cupboard. He'd been meaning to pick up a few, kept forgetting whenever he was anywhere near the shops. And he _certainly _wasn't going to apparate like _this_. Except Zee was probably already gone for the day, and witches didn't tend to like other people going through their personal effects. Bugger. Though Zee _had_ to have been accustomed to Bella going through her things. Both of them, probably. Yes, he decided, if she had one he would help himself, and if she asked him about it he would just blame Little Bella. That seemed like a good plan.

After coffee.

"You look like shite, Sirius," Harry said. Not that he looked _much _better. Or, well, Sirius wasn't entirely certain what he looked like at the moment, but Harry looked like he hadn't slept in a week, even though he was only wearing shorts and a tee-shirt, and his hair was doing the Potter thing worse than usual, so he couldn't have been awake more than a few minutes.

"I feel like shite, Harry. You don't happen to have a hangover potion on hand, do you?"

"Er...no? Why would I...?"

Right, Harry was one of those boring teenagers who didn't sneak around getting drunk behind the backs of the adults who were nominally in charge of them. Sirius kept forgetting how different the kid was from himself at that age, and James, and...pretty much everyone, honestly, the world had gotten boring while he'd been busy getting old with the dementors. Well, Lily had never been one to sneak around getting drunk or high or whatever, she'd just sneaked around doing dark magic and cavorting with Slytherins. Er...fraternising? Well, cavorting _might_ be right, at least at like, Walpurgis, but that wasn't what he'd meant. Just generally sneaking around with Snivels and designing rituals and shite. Words were hard.

In his defense, he was _still_ hung over.

Very.

"Never mind. You look a bit shite yourself. Nightmares again?" he asked, pouring himself a cup of blessed, wonderful caffeine and pretending to be unconcerned.

After several weeks of constant nagging, Harry had eventually admitted that he was having weird nightmares about His Mouldiness, which Snivellus had supposedly said were nothing to worry about. Which, ignoring that Harry had talked to _Snivellus_ about it before him or Little Bella or anyone but Blaise, was obviously complete dragonshite.

Sirius knew a _little_ about what Lily had been doing, back in Eighty-One. Enough to know that she'd been messing with soul magic rituals. And Harry was a legilimens _and _a Parselmouth, just like Lord Snakefucker. It didn't take a genius to think maybe something she'd done, or that and Mouldyshorts casting some sort of tynged in a final act of malevolence, had forged a connection between the two of them. Between their _souls_. How else would Harry have ended up with that ridiculous pair of inherited talents, when no one else in House Potter had had either one for centuries? This theory was especially convincing because the scar from the ritual that night had _clearly _been hurting him, every time Sirius had seen him in the wake of one of these 'nightmares'.

And if _he'd_ been able to put it together, Snivels definitely had. The only real question was whether Snivellus had lied to Harry and Blaise, or whether Harry and Blaise were lying to everyone else. Sirius was leaning toward the latter. Snivels _could _be trying to stop Harry dealing with the problem because he was still not-so-secretly an evil Death Eater and also a fucking twat who'd hated Jamie since they were _eleven_, but he had fucking _worshipped_ Evans, and his precious Dark Lord had killed her, so. He was betting Harry just didn't want to freak the rest of them out. Which was stupid, because he was freaking out anyway, and he wasn't entirely certain Bella was _capable _of freaking out. Zee...well, it wasn't her problem, was it? So she might be _concerned_, a _little_, but not much.

"I don't want to talk about it."

Of course he didn't. Stubborn arse. _That_ was _exactly _like Jamie. Well, fine. Sirius was in no fit state to bug him about it at the moment. He gave the kid a noncommittal sort of hum before asking, "Where is everyone?"

"Uh...I don't know, actually. I guess Mira's at work, and the Portal's open, so Lyra's probably in Britain. Blaise was gone before I woke up, though, and he—" Harry cut himself off, going _very _red, probably because he'd just realised he'd implied that Blaise had spent the night in his room. Again. For completely innocent, nightmare-related reasons that had nothing to do with Harry _very obviously _fancying him.

(Everyone knew. The fact that Harry had yet to do anything about it was completely baffling. James would probably have proposed like six times by now, and Lily would have had her fun with him and moved on months ago. Honestly, the way he was acting was more like Remus than anyone, and he didn't even have the excuse of trying to hide that he was a werewolf.)

Sirius let him stew in his awkwardness, busying himself with toast — he'd _prefer_ something greasier and more filling at the moment, but he wasn't certain he had the energy to actually _cook_ something. Not to mention, he always had been a bit rubbish at cooking. The whole time he and Remus had lived together, they'd survived on muggle takeaway and sandwiches, and whatever the girls kept on the back of the range at Safehouse Four.

After several long seconds, Harry abruptly changed the subject. "I'm making an omelette. Want one?"

"_God_, yes." He briefly wondered whether Harry was getting good enough at legilimency that he hadn't noticed the kid eavesdropping on him, but then decided that he probably just looked _that_ done in.

Rather than sit around and watch his godson slice ham and dice peppers and half an onion (which, he was _really _fast, how did he even...?), Sirius decided to excuse himself to the loo. (Whereupon he realised that, yes, he _did_ look as shite as he felt.) And when he came back, there was _food_. _Real_ food, not just fucking _toast_. It was almost like having an elf.

Hmm... Maybe Little Bella would let him bring one of the Black elves over here. Not _that_ one (the one who'd kept him in the Nursery at Ancient House, they hadn't got on), but there had to be others around, and that _would_ solve the problem of his not knowing a damn thing about cooking outside of potions. (He _might_ be able to make soup, he realised. Maybe. He'd never tried...)

"You are my hero," he said, completely seriously, tucking in. Oh, God, there was _cheese_. "This is amazing. Like, fucking ambrosia amazing. Did I know you could cook?"

Harry flushed again. Seriously, the kid spent about half his time red in the face. "Er...probably not. I haven't much since, well... We always go out to dinner, here, and...I dunno... I don't really like it, cooking. But it's just an omelette. They're...not hard? I mean, Aunt Petunia taught me how to do omelettes when I was about _four_, I think."

Sirius had _nothing_ to say on the topic of Petunia Dursley. He'd asked Little Bella about Harry's foster family, after he had said some things in passing that suggested Petunia would've given Walburga a run for her money in a shite mums contest, and he couldn't _believe_ she'd _only _broken that bitch's arm. He wasn't sure he would have been able to stop himself killing the lot of them, her and her obnoxious walrus of a husband, and their son he'd never even heard of until Little Bella was explaining the fucking blood wards Dumbledore had put on the family. Even if it _wasn't exactly growing up in the House of Black_ — honestly, Little Bella was hardly even trying anymore — that didn't mean they weren't child-abusing sacks of shite. And _apparently _Harry didn't want them dead. Which was just...fucking weird. Sirius was pretty sure he'd want them dead, if it was him.

What he _didn't_ want was to get in some weird argument about whether Lily's sister deserved to die a fiery death when he was only feeling marginally human, and he had the best omelette in the history of the world sitting in front of him. So he applied himself to his eggs and coffee and sat there _saying nothing_ as loudly as possible — if Harry wanted to hear what he had to say about the Dursleys, he was welcome to read Sirius's mind for it, but if he did _that_, he really couldn't complain about hearing it, could he.

Apparently he didn't, because after a few minutes, he spoke up again, on a completely different subject. "Um...Sirius..."

"Hmm?"

"As, um...my godfather, I can...ask you for advice, right?"

"Sure, pup. What about?" he asked, intrigued despite his headache. Harry had never asked him for advice on anything. In fact, he wasn't sure he'd ever heard Harry ask for advice on anything from anyone — Little Bella was as nosey as the original, more than willing to give completely _unsolicited _advice, and presumably anything Harry cared to ask Blaise he could do privately in their little mind-fucking sessions. Or just whenever, Blaise did tend to use mind magic pretty much all the time. Kind of like having dinner with de Mort, but _far _less terrifying. (Though de Mort _also_ couldn't complain about things he overheard Sirius thinking loudly to himself. Say, the fact that _Lord Voldemort _and _the Death Eaters_ were the tweest fucking thing he'd ever heard of, for example.)

Harry froze, wide-eyed, as though he hadn't expected to have to follow up with his actual question. Which was just bloody stupid, he couldn't possibly have thought Sirius would say _no_, could he? He got up to pour himself another cup of coffee while Harry worked through his completely unwarranted shock. Harry, of course, chose to talk as soon as his back was turned.

Jamie used to do that, too, not looking people in the eye when he was talking about something that made him uncomfortable. Though things that Jamie got weird about were, like, Evans channelling the Dark that one time, and Sirius decapitating some Death Eater they ran into on a raid — because how was he supposed to _not _try out a _light decapitation spell_, when he had the opportunity? — and talking about life after the War, because Jamie _really _wanted to believe there _would _be a life after the war, but he couldn't quite convince himself they'd survive. (It was a cruel irony that Sirius, who had never thought past the next battle, living each night like it could be his last, had made it, but Jamie, who'd been fighting for the future more than anyone, hadn't.)

Harry, on the other hand, seemed to be concerned about, "Ah, well...you know things about, um..._relationships_, I guess, right?"

Sirius smothered a snigger, turning back to the table to find Harry fiddling with his silverware, looking anywhere but at him. He took pity on the poor kid, hopped up on the counter rather than go back to the seat directly across from him.

"Sure," he said. Granted, mostly from watching _other_ people do 'relationships' — Sirius himself was more comfortable with a level of commitment along the lines of his fun last night with J-girl and Surfer Dude, and never seeing them again. Harry would probably be better off asking Zee about this sort of thing, but he'd gotten the impression over the past few weeks that Blaise was more like he had been at fourteen than Jamie or Remus, so he was pretty sure he could offer something valid. And even if he couldn't, Sirius wasn't about to _send Harry away_ when he was actually _talking_ to him for once, not just being quiet and awkward. Well, okay, he was clearly still being awkward, but talking — talking was progress!

Or, well, it _would_ be, if he'd actually _kept_ talking, instead of chasing a bit of mushroom around his plate and overthinking whatever it was he wanted to talk about. Which, Sirius was pretty sure he could guess. "So, this is about _Blaise_..." he prompted him, trailing off expectantly.

Harry went red again, nodded, and chased the mushroom around a bit more before exclaiming out of nowhere, "He's— I'm really starting to think he's actually _trying_ to drive me insane!"

_God _damn _it, Sirius, don't laugh!_ "Oh?" he choked out, _barely_ managing to keep a straight face. Because, well...on the one hand, he was pretty sure Blaise wasn't trying to drive Harry nuts in an actually certifiable sort of way, but he almost certainly _was_ trying to work him up to a point that Harry would do something _he'd _consider crazy without thinking it through — like giving in and snogging him out of the blue or something — because if he gave himself time to think about it he'd probably chicken out. It was completely obvious, and in Sirius's professional opinion he was doing a hell of a job at it. If Harry managed to hold out until the end of the summer he'd be shocked.

"Okay, he can't _possibly _not know that I, um..."

"Fancy him," Sirius supplied.

"Er, yes. That. I mean, you obviously know — even _Lyra_ knows — and Blaise has been in my bloody head, okay? He can't possibly not know."

"Oh, he knows," Sirius confirmed.

"Yeah, but he keeps acting like he _doesn't_! And it's driving me mad! I mean, he keeps showing me memories of snogging other people and acting like he's not doing it on purpose when he _definitely _is, and just, spending the night in my room because, well, the nightmare thing, and I practically fucking _told_ him that he'd be my first choice to go to that stupid fucking Ball with, and he didn't even _say _anything, even though I _know_ he knows what I meant!"

"Er...the Yule Ball?" Sirius asked, momentarily distracted. "Isn't he going with Daphne Greengrass?"

"_Yes_. Did _everyone _know about that?"

"You mean their betrothal? Er...yes?" According to Little Bella, Zee had briefly suspended talks with the Greengrasses in the hopes that she could snag _Bella_ for Blaise, but she'd made it clear that wasn't going to happen, so the contract with the Greengrasses _had_ to be damn near finalised by now. Which was a bit of a coup for the Zabinis, anyway — it wasn't often that a foreign commoner married the heir of a Noble House. Though Blaise _had_ been raised in Britain, and Zee had been pseudo-attached to the Blacks...pretty much forever, Bella had been bringing her to society events since they were teenagers (because fuck convention). Not to mention, she'd managed to end up Director of Education, which was essentially an honorary ladyship, and accumulated a fortune to rival the Malfoys' when no one was looking. So maybe it didn't _quite_ count, but Walburga had always called the Zabinis foreign commoners anyway, so Sirius assumed anyone who cared about that shite would.

Harry made a frustrated _urgh_ sound, interrupting Sirius's mental wandering. He was doing better now than he had right after escaping from Azkaban, but he'd never been _great_ at keeping on topic. (Ever.) "Whatever. Yes, Blaise is going with Daphne, even though Daphne is dating Tracey, because politics. Not the point. I just— He keeps acting like– like I don't even know. I _know_ he knows I, er, fancy him, but he acts like he doesn't care, except, well, he keeps doing things that he _has_ to know are driving me mad, and— And _stop_ laughing, it's not _funny_!"

It was. It really, _really _was. But, okay, he could do this...advice thing. "Sorry, sorry. It's just, have you considered just snogging him?" Harry glared at him, a legilimency probe skimming the very edges of his consciousness. "I'm not fucking with you, kid. This is classic _I like you but I want you to make the next move_ behavior. You very obviously fancy him, yeah? So he's making it clear that he knows this, but still treating you the same to make it clear that he doesn't mind. So if you want him, just go for it."

The kid scoffed at him, rolling his eyes. "_He doesn't mind_ isn't exactly encouraging. How do you know he wants me to do..._something_? I mean, he hasn't done anything himself, I don't even know if he likes me like that!"

"Er...maybe that wasn't the best way to say that..." It was. It _definitely _was. "First off, not telling someone as bloody obvious as you to fuck off is tantamount to admitting he's interested—" (Harry glared at him, but didn't debate the point.) "—but...fuck, how should I put this..."

Unless Sirius had completely misread the kid, he was interested in physical relationships, sure, snogging "other people" — the way Harry had put it, it kind of sounded like a _lot_ of other people, so yeah, interested in snogging. Probably sex, too. Sirius had been getting up to all sorts of shite by fourth year, and _he_ hadn't grown up with _Mirabella Zabini _as his primary example of proper behavior.

Well, no, okay, that wasn't _entirely_ true — Zee had been _around_ pretty much as long as he could remember. Before he'd broken with the Family, when he was a kid, she'd been kind of a ridiculously attractive example of _im_proper behavior, which...might have been a bit of an influence on him, actually, now he came to think of it, especially since he had kind of _hated_ being proper, and being Bella's girlfriend — Bella _had_ been his favourite cousin, once upon a time — _and _a foreign commoner who didn't give a single shite what the House of Black thought of her had made Zee pretty much the _single coolest person_ he'd _ever_ met, so...

Okay, maybe that actually explained why Blaise reminded Sirius so much of himself as a teenager. Huh.

"Er...Sirius?"

Oh, bugger, he'd gotten distracted again. Whatever, point was, Blaise was a normal horny teenager, but it likely wasn't _remotely _difficult for him to pull whoever he wanted for a quick 'snog' — even if legilimency wasn't cheating, he was an attractive, confident young...not quite _gentleman_ (which would only make him more attractive to a rather large segment of the teenage population, being a cool semi-outsider), which meant that the physical shite that traditionally went along with _relationships_ probably wasn't much of a priority for him. Well, getting it from Harry specifically wouldn't be. But the _emotional_ shite that went along with _relationships_... He was pretty sure by that measure they were already _a thing_, and had been for a while.

"Okay, what exactly do you think makes a couple a couple and not just friends?" he finally asked, deciding to take the same track Marlene had when he'd been begging her for insight on Jamie. From the opposite side, kind of, but more or less.

"Er, well, generally there's more snogging? And, um—" He cut himself off, going red yet again.

It suddenly occurred to Sirius that it was entirely possible no one had ever talked to the kid about sex stuff, like contraceptive spells and how to avoid shite like that AIDS thing the muggles were so concerned about these days. He should...probably do that, at some point. But not _right now_, he figured he still had a few months at _least_ before Harry worked himself up to actually shagging anyone. "Yeah, okay, so is Blaise dating those _other people_ he's been snogging?"

"Of course not! He's just...snogging them. They don't, I don't know, do anything _other_ than snog."

"Such as...?"

Harry shrugged uncomfortably. "Spending time together and stuff?"

"Right, and how is _spending time together and stuff_ different from just being friends with someone?"

Another shrug. More embarrassed squirming in place. "It just _is_."

Well, Sirius couldn't say that wasn't a fair answer, he'd never been able to say how _just friends _and _relationship_ relationships were all that different, either. Though there hadn't really been anything _just_ about his friendships. Marlene had said that was because he _loved _his friends — his _real _friends, not the people he was just killing time around or got thrown together with like comrades-in-arms — in a very all-or-nothing way. And, well, he didn't _know_ Blaise was the same way, but the 'friendship' he and Harry had looked a hell of a lot more like his 'friendship' with Jamie than Jamie's friendship with, say, Alice and Frank, for example.

"Okay...so does Blaise _spend time together and stuff_ with you?"

"Well...yeah, I guess. I mean... But he does with Daphne and Theo and Lyra, too, and I'm pretty sure he's not interested in dating any of them, so..."

"Er...I think what you mean to say is, he's not interested in _snogging_ them." Which might or might not be true — Sirius would be willing to bet Blaise would snog any of his friends if they wanted to. (Normal teenage boy, and all that.) In fact, he was pretty sure he _had_ snogged Lyra, she'd mentioned something in passing... Whatever, not the point. "Because what I'm getting here is, you've already got the _spending time together and stuff_ part of being a couple down, you just want to snog him as well."

"Uh...I..._guess_?"

Sirius was right. He _knew_ he was right. He'd spent _far_ too many years at the centre of teenage drama to be wrong. Granted, Marley would probably have found some softer way to say it, but really, it was a very straightforward problem. And now that Harry knew what the objective actually _was_, they could get back to the solving part of said problem.

"Okay, well, what I meant, earlier, was that he's basically saying if you decide you want to snog him, fine, go ahead, he's in favour, but if you decide you _don't_ want to, he's fine with that, too. He obviously doesn't care whether he otherwise spends much time with someone he's snogging or not, so he's already getting plenty of that. But you _did_ just say he only has a handful of friends. I'm guessing he thinks that's more important, and doesn't want to fuck it up by doing something you're not entirely sure you're comfortable with and chasing you away."

Harry pouted at him — the same pout that Blaise and Little Bella (and _Bella _Bella, come to think of it) had stolen from Zee. (Sirius wondered fleetingly whether Harry realised how feminine that expression really was. Probably not. _Damn it, Sirius, don't laugh!_) "He can read my fucking mind, Sirius, I'm pretty sure he knows what I am and am not comfortable with."

"Do..._you_ know what you are and aren't comfortable with?" Sirius had to ask, because given how _incredibly uncomfortable _and just _awkward_ Harry was about so many things, he...really didn't think he did.

And apparently that was the end of this conversation, as Harry stared at him uncomprehendingly for a long moment, then pushed back his chair. "Er...thanks, Sirius," he said, sounding far more unnerved than grateful, and brought his plate to the sink. "I'm gonna go..." He trailed off, obviously uncertain what he was going to do, aside from _be elsewhere_.

Which, okay, that could have gone better. Sirius had just been coming around to the _try snogging him_ point again when they'd gone off-topic. But it could have gone a lot worse, too. It wasn't as though he hadn't already got that bit in earlier, for one thing. (He had actually been pretty much out of advice at _Have you tried snogging him?_ The rest of that conversation had been 1000% dragonshite. Dragonshite based on things Marlene had told him, but still.) And at least Harry hadn't told him to fuck off, which was what he had told Marley when she'd questioned whether _he_ knew what he wanted from _James_. Of course, he'd actually _known_ what he wanted — _everything_, and he _knew_ how completely insane that made him sound, which was why he'd told her to fuck off instead of answering.

Harry probably had to think about it. He was a smart kid, Sirius was pretty sure he'd realise his wisest and most fantastic of godfathers was completely right, eventually.

And while he did, Sirius was going to see if there was a hangover potion anywhere in the flat, and take a shower because he smelled like vodka and sex, and then he might take a nap, because fuck this _consciousness _thing. Vastly overrated.

* * *

_OMG, Sirius, what is this — maturity? Perish the thought!_

_Sirius's attitude toward Snape is considerably better than in canon because A) the confrontation at the Shack never happened and B) Snape annoys Lyra. The impact of the latter cannot be overstated. Also, it's not weird at all that he's now fucking Bella's girlfriend. Just, you know, fourteen-year-old Sirius would be SO proud of him, because Zee is the coolest person ever, getting with her might actually balance out the anti-cool-points from getting locked up for a murder he didn't even get to commit._

_—Leigha_


	19. Resolved Sexual Tension

_Yes! He had done it! It had taken longer than he had expected — after his son's escape, Crouch had revised his security, the information the boy had given his lord outdated, and Lord Voldemort had hardly made the study of wardcrafting a priority. He'd had more important things to attend to, and specialists for that sort of thing anyway, but he needed young Barty in his current position, and a few days made little difference at this stage in the plan._

_He'd simply had need to prove that no ward could keep out Lord Voldemort, any more than any paltry human mind could withstand him._

_Occlumency?_

_Pathetic!_

_Even the best occlumens was _hardly _a match for Lord Voldemort — Bellatrix had been _perfect_, and even _she _had never managed to keep him out. Crouch wasn't in the same league as his most loyal lieutenant, let alone the Dark Lord himself. _

_He slipped into the man's bedroom, silent as a serpent, a brief burst of magic lifting him onto the bed, his target's slumber undisturbed. Not _necessary_, of course — he could feel the man's mind from the corridor — but to creep about on the floor was so _very _undignified._

_Not that the man before him was what one might consider _dignified_. The facade he maintained in public life was, of course, an uptight, self-righteous automaton of a wizard, but under all that he _was _only human. He was younger than Lord Voldemort himself, but prematurely aged, his face lined by years of stress and thinning, disheveled hair threaded with grey. Drool stained his pillow and an unconscious frown reflected the troubled dreams behind closed eyes. Lord Voldemort was hardly equipped in this state to taste the scent of a potion on the air, but he suspected that if he could the vial on the bedside table, carelessly abandoned alongside the man's precisely placed wand, would carry the sour reek of a sleeping solution._

_The house itself was equally pathetic, the home of a man who had forgotten how to care for himself, if indeed he had ever _known _how to do so. His elf — _Barty's _elf — dismissed after freeing her master as Barty had in turn freed Lord Voldemort himself, had not been replaced, a desperate attempt at order maintained in the organisation of his personal effects, even as cobwebs and dust gathered in the corners of rooms, discarded robes and soiled dishes accumulating in piles upon the most convenient surfaces._

"Wake up_, Bartemius,"_ _Lord Voldemort ordered him, savoring his shock, his confusion and fear as his eyes blinked open, the Dark Lord's temporary form reflected in them. This was also unnecessary, but he thought of it as a gift to his loyal servant, to make this failure of a man who had sired him _suffer _for his crimes against his son. A wave of hatred and dark joy rose up within him, rage and satisfaction entwined — as vile as this man might be, this man who had delayed the return of his son to his Lord's service for so many long years, he was not without use. _

_The man began to reach for his wand, to speak, scrabbling away from the Dark Lord's golem, struggling to sit and managing two paltry syllables ("What the-?") before his mental shields broke under the pressure of Lord Voldemort's assault. He resisted only a moment longer before surrendering to the inevitable, his consciousness retreating as Lord Voldemort twisted the mortal's mind to serve his own, subsuming his will entirely. _

Pathetic_. _

_He would have expected someone so well-versed in the Imperius to have enough personality to put up a _bit _of a fight, at least. But then, no mere _human_, no Ministry _stooge_, could _hope _to stand against so relentless a force as the will of Lord Voldemort._

_He took control effortlessly, stretching and flexing the man's muscles, wiping the drool from his cheek with the briefest thought, before abandoning the construct he had so briefly inhabited entirely, settling into the wizard's body as though it were his own. Not for long — it would certainly not be to his advantage to infiltrate the government of Magical Britain at so high a level only to be discovered as his vessel was corrupted by the overwhelming power of his sublime presence, as that idiot Quirrell had been. But long enough. Long enough to remove him to a safer location, long enough to capture him with the most useful, most versatile of the so-called Unforgivable Curses, remake him as an extension of Lord Voldemort's will, regardless how unwilling a conscript he might be._

Yes..._yes... _All proceeds according to plan_, he thought, shaking off the lethargic effects of the potion the man had indeed taken and rising to his feet. Yes_...

* * *

Halfway around the world, Harry Potter woke panting, fighting the urge to scream. He managed it, just, though he wasn't quite able to keep his fingers from straying to the burning scar on his forehead. They were cold, felt nice against his feverish skin, even if they did nothing to ease the burn.

"_Hey_," Blaise said sleepily, his head rising slightly from his pillow on the other side of the bed — which was enormous, more than twice as large as their beds at school, it was _barely _like sharing a bed with someone...even though Blaise sprawled in his sleep as much as he did when he was awake, he must not have been out very long if he was still all the way over there...

Harry had, at some point after his conversation with Sirius, he wasn't really sure _when_, come to accept the idea that Blaise probably _did_ want him to make the next move. _This_, sleeping together, wasn't it. Granted, Harry wasn't entirely certain what it _was_, the next move, but the sharing a bed thing, that was just because, well...

It started with the lucid dreaming thing. Snape had told him to get someone to wake him up at odd intervals to catch himself dreaming, then write down the dreams. Which seemed like a good idea, but after a couple of nights, Blaise started falling asleep on him, and there was really no reason to make him suffer, too, so Harry had asked Lyra to do it instead. Not because he wanted to make _her_ suffer along with him, but because it wasn't as though she ever slept at normal people times anyway.

That, of course, also hadn't worked, because Lyra had thought he meant that Snape said he wasn't to sleep _at all_, which Sirius had confirmed _was _a method of learning lucid dreaming — getting so sleep-deprived that you couldn't tell where the line was between sleeping and waking — but one that only _crazy people_ like Sirius used. And when they'd finally established that Harry was not nearly that insane, Lyra had frankly informed him that she'd only agreed to do this because she'd thought it was only going to take a week or so, and she had no intention of spending every night for who knew how many weeks in California just to wake him up every few hours, and why didn't he just use an alarm charm like a normal person?

Which...okay, aside from the irony of _Lyra_ saying anyone should act like a normal person, he'd felt like a bit of an idiot, then. But a _vindicated _idiot when he'd just turned the alarm off and went back to sleep the first couple of times, didn't even fully wake up. So then Blaise had suggested that he could stay with Harry and make sure he actually got up when the alarm went off, until he got into the habit of it.

But before he'd actually gotten in the habit of waking up to a fucking alarm without the rest of his dorm room turning out and being loud and obnoxious and reinforcing the damn thing, he'd...kind of gotten used to Blaise being there. Because even when it _wasn't_ time to wake up to write down his dreams, if he was tossing and turning like he was having a nightmare, it tended to wake Blaise, and then Blaise would wake Harry, and even if that maybe wasn't the _best _way to deal with accidentally legilimising an undead dark lord from halfway around the world, it...seemed pretty effective?

And Blaise didn't seem to mind getting woken up by Harry's alarms and nightmares three or four times a night, so now they just...shared a bed. Harry had no idea what he was going to do when they had to go back to Hogwarts. He'd never considered sharing a bed with someone before this summer, and if someone had asked him about it beforehand, he'd probably have said no, he wouldn't want to — it had taken _ages_ for him to get used to sharing a dorm, even — and he _had_ been all awkward and uncomfortable about it for the first week or two, but now it was kind of hard to imagine sleeping alone.

Especially since he suspected he'd also started wandering into Blaise's mind sometimes, instead of Voldemort's. It was kind of hard to tell because Blaise didn't dream, but he thought that was what was happening when he woke up well-rested and couldn't remember anything at all. Which, dreamwalking into the mind of the nearest person you were really familiar with was apparently a way more normal legilimency problem and Blaise's mind was infinitely less disturbing than Voldemort's, but he was _kind of_ concerned that, with Blaise fifteen floors away on the other side of the Castle, he'd start creeping into his roommates' dreams instead, and that was just...no. So he was already planning to ask Lyra to ward his bed so that wouldn't happen, but then the only place for his sleeping mind to wander off to would be _Voldemort's _mind, and he still hadn't managed to stay lucid enough to fucking _stop doing that_.

Though...maybe he was making progress? "M'fine," he muttered, reaching for the muggle notebook and biro that lived on his bedside table, jotting down what he remembered.

"Voldemort again?" Blaise sounded _much_ more awake than Harry felt, which somehow didn't seem fair.

He groaned. "Yeah. Though, I don't know, it was weird."

"Weird how?"

"Weird like...he was breaking into someone's house to imperius them, but he was like...an evil doll, or something."

Blaise snorted trying not to laugh. "Like Chuckie?"

Harry had just seen the muggle horror movie for the first time the other day — some theater had been having a horror festival downtown. Harry thought they were kind of silly, but Blaise loved them. And even Harry had to admit they were more fun when there were other people around being all excited and scared and silly about the whole thing.

"Ah, no, more like a mannequin, you know, no face? But tiny. Like, maybe a foot tall. So I think maybe I was kind of pulling away enough to get normal nightmare things mixed up with what he was doing?" He _had_ been getting better at not focusing on what Voldemort was doing, less like he was _there_ and more like he just had a vague impression of what was going on, maybe with a few clear flashes, but _nothing_ like the first few dreams, which had been...

Anyway, he was getting good enough at _not_ getting lost in Voldemort's mind that when Blaise asked, "Do you know who he was using the Imperius on?" all he could do was shrug.

"He had dark eyes?" Harry only knew that because he'd seen the doll's faceless face reflected in them when he woke up. "That doesn't sound quite right, though, now that I'm thinking about it. Maybe...yeah, I think he was actually going to possess the guy, and take him somewhere else to imperius him."

Actually, he thought he _had_ possessed him, and it was a lot more like when Harry had tried to legilimise Lyra than when Voldemort possessed Barty Crouch Junior, which was one of the things that kind of made him think some of the details might be from his own nightmares.

Blaise frowned. "Why would he... Oh! Whoever he was trying to imperius is probably someone important enough that he has monitoring wards to alert someone if certain kinds of spells are cast in his house."

"Well that would make sense, I think he was...someone in the Ministry?" And then, with a sudden, sick realisation, Harry's blood began to run cold. "_Britain's_ Ministry — Blaise, he's back in Britain!"

Voldemort was back in Britain, and Harry was going to be there, too — they were going to the World Cup, leaving tomorrow, or...later today, probably. He'd been so excited, even more than when they'd gone to Magic Mountain for his birthday (because _rollercoasters_), and now... Even if Voldemort wasn't anywhere near the Cup, knowing he was in the same bloody country was going to make Harry too anxious to enjoy the thing properly, he just knew it.

Especially since just being in Britain for a few days for the Final was one thing. He'd already agreed to disguise himself so people wouldn't freak out about his presence like they always did, even when someone _hadn't _started rumors of his untimely death — and even though quidditch matches _had_ been known to go on for _weeks_, Lyra had insisted that the arithmancy said it wouldn't go more than about six hours, tops. (Something about the Nimbus 2001's speed and maneuverability and the changes that had been made to the player detecting enchantments on a standard Snitch apparently made it very unlikely that it would be able to evade the Seekers for more than a few hours.) _After _the match, they'd be spending one more night at the campground and then coming back here, putting an ocean and an entire bloody America between him and Voldemort's evil, possessed doll. (If in fact he was possessing a foot-tall mannequin, which...seemed unlikely? Maybe? Oh, who was he kidding, having an unconscious line into Voldemort's mind didn't give him any sort of clue what the madman might or might not do.)

But he wouldn't be _staying _here. He _was_ going to go back to Hogwarts. He couldn't exactly pretend not to be Harry Potter at Hogwarts. And he _definitely _didn't think he'd be safer there, he'd already been attacked by Quirrellmort and a horcrux and a bloody basilisk, not to mention he'd shared a dorm room with the man who'd betrayed his parents to Voldemort for two and a half years. Not exactly the safest place in Britain. Sirius had managed to break in and escape even while he was half out of his mind and everyone was on high alert looking for him! (Granted, they weren't looking for _Padfoot_, but a big fucking dog sneaking into the school still should've been noticed, Harry thought.)

Voldemort and whoever he'd possessed or enslaved with that _horrible _fucking spell — he'd asked Blaise about the Unforgivables, after Lyra had been hit with the Cruciatus, and the Imperius sounded like the worst of the lot — would know _exactly _where he was, and—

_Hey. Harry. Look at me,_ Blaise thought at him, a wave of serenity and confidence breaking over him even as the hint of compulsion behind the order had his head turning without a thought.

Blaise was suddenly _very _close to him, their noses only inches apart. Somehow it still surprised Harry when an arm snaked its way around his shoulders. He flinched. Blaise pulled back far enough to give him that cool, reassuring smile he did so well — not mocking or laughing or happy, even, more like _Harry, you're being a silly moo, can't you see everything's under control._ Harry could barely make it out by the dim city-at-night light that filtered through the curtains, but he was pretty sure it was that particular smile. "It's going to be alright, Harry."

Still calm, still impossibly confident, Harry could tell he actually _believed_ that, but, "No, Blaise, how do you— You can't know that! You just _can't_. He's going to be there, I know it, and—"

"And if he is, we'll exorcise him, or stuff his little Tommy-doll in a box and lock it in the Chamber of Secrets, or something."

"This isn't _funny_, Blaise! He– He has people again, working for him! Crouch, and whoever he just possessed! He's not just a helpless wraith, he's got some kind of body, he can do magic, and he wants to _kill me_, okay? He wants to kill me and Dumbledore and burn Britain to the fucking _ground_, and now he's _there_, and fucking Lestrange is on the loose, and—"

"Bellatrix doesn't care about you," Blaise interrupted. "And you have your own allies. Lyra and I aren't going to let Riddle kill you."

"No offence, Blaise, but you're pretty worthless in a fight, and in case you missed it, Lyra got kidnapped and tortured herself at the end of last year! And how the _fuck_ would you know Lestrange isn't after me?"

"If Bella was trying to kill you, you'd already be dead. Lyra underestimated Draco at the end of last year, it won't happen again. And I may be useless in a fight, but you're not. Gin's not. Theo and Lyra are fucking scary, and Snape could kick both their arses. Besides, intelligence wins wars. Intelligence and planning. I'm _very _good at getting people to tell me things I want to know, and Maïa's fucking diabolical. Snape was a _professional spy_. I'm pretty sure the three of us will be able to suss out any plots against you now that we know to look for them. You know Snape's on your side, now, so there's an adult in the school you can take shite like Quirrell or the basilisk to instead of trying to handle it yourself, and Mira and Sirius out here in the real world..."

He trailed off for a moment, looking deeply into Harry's eyes, not using legilimency on him, just...staring. He'd leaned in again at some point, Harry hadn't really noticed when. He was too close for Harry to meet both his eyes at once, close enough to feel his breath on his cheek when he said, so certain, "You're _not alone_, Harry."

And Harry, without thinking, turned his head, his lips pressing against Blaise's — hot, and softer than he'd expected. Blaise froze in surprise, and Harry had a brief moment of panic — what if– what if he didn't want to, this was a terrible mistake, he shouldn't have—

But then that arm around his shoulders was pulling him closer, a hand rising to his cheek, long, thin fingers slipping into his hair and a thought slipping into his mind, _don't be stupid, Harry, why shouldn't you have?_ And, well... Honestly, he couldn't really remember at the moment, because Blaise's fingers were trailing across his shoulders and he tasted like peppermint, and he was all warm and solid and real and _here_.

With Harry.

Saying without saying that whatever Harry needed, he would be there, and they'd get through his weird Voldemort dreams and the madman's latest attempt to make a comeback and dealing with everyone inevitably freaking out about him not being dead and the fucking Triwizard Tournament with its stupid _Ball_ and anything else life decided to throw at them, and _everything was going to be alright_.

And even if it wasn't, at least he'd got _one_ thing figured out, he thought, pulling himself free long enough to breathe, long enough to catch a glimpse of Blaise's grin, so white against his skin and the shadows. Long enough for him to say, "About time, Potter," and Harry to say, "Shut up, Zabini," and long enough to realise that there were things he'd much rather be doing than talking or worrying about Tom fucking Riddle and the threat he may or may not pose to Harry's life at some indefinite point in the future that definitely _wasn't_ right _now_, in his bed, with Blaise being all..._Blaise_, and—

Ooh_, that felt _good_...that felt _really _good..._

* * *

_This scene ends here because not being (or ever having been) a teenage boy, I don't think I'm really capable of writing the rest of it. And also because writing sex scenes between people half your age seems kind of squicky to me. —Leigha_

_The summer scenes are all finished now. We have two more to be posted, and then we'll actually be getting into fourth year. Finally. Because we're absolutely ridiculous. —Lysandra_


	20. So, that happened

Severus pivoted on one toe, ducked a poorly-cast fire-whip, then reflected a broad-angle physical force curse, using a concave shield form to focus the impact of the spell on a single spot...which just so happened to be his opponent's center of mass. He _had_, of course, tried to dodge, but Severus hadn't even needed to use legilimency to read his intention from the tension in his limbs and a quick glance to his left.

Sloppy, but that was to be expected. Morgenstern's attracted a _diverse_ clientele, from visiting professional duelists who found the legal limitations of public dueling gyms in Britain to be too obnoxious for words and Aurors who wanted to test their skills in a more realistic setting, to would-be warlocks and Knockturn Alley thugs practicing for the street fights they would inevitably be involved in. Unfortunately, the latter made up the largest proportion of the population, and those most eager to try their hand against a former Death Eater for bragging rights.

The spell lifted the dunderhead who'd cast it into the air, throwing him into the wards with an audible cracking of ribs before he fell to the floor in an unconscious heap.

Morgenstern shot red sparks into the air, signalling the end of the match, his medics levitating the fallen wizard from the stage. "You taking another round, Snape?"

"No," he said shortly, yielding the stage. It was the victor's prerogative to hold the ground until a challenger managed to take it from him, but after three consecutive victories the proprietor began to allow pairs to attempt to unseat the victor, and Severus found himself in need of a break in any case.

When he returned from the loo, the stage had been taken by a tall, dark-skinned young man who hadn't been there when he'd left. A young man who was, unless Severus was very mistaken, an Auror...or, more likely, a Hit Wizard. He'd never before seen the kid — he couldn't have been more than twenty years old — and he was fairly certain he'd not only _met_, but _taught_ all of the Aurors in that age range. In any case, the style favored by the DLE was very distinctive — a very tight, formal foundation, modified by field agents (especially those Alastor Moody had had a hand in training) to include elements of the choppier, ad-hoc street-fighting style they were most likely to encounter on the job. It tended to be a charm-heavy, largely defensive approach, with an emphasis on disarming or incapacitating a suspect rather than killing or permanently disabling them. This particular Hit Wizard clearly favored transfiguration, but Severus had already seen him pass up two opportunities to end the fight if he was willing to go for the throat, which he clearly wasn't. Still, it wasn't long at all until the witch he was facing lay bound and frozen at his feet.

"That was the second round. You gonna try taking it back?"

Severus turned to the grizzled old warlock who had addressed him with a smirk. "_Try_?"

He _had_ only just begun sharpening his skills again — even if Potter _hadn't_ alerted him to the Dark Lord's imminent return, the Dark Mark had begun prickling suspiciously as well these past two days — but he hadn't let himself get so rusty as to be incapable of taking down a baby Hit Wizard, assuming the (il)legality of his methods wasn't an issue. (_Very _few duelists could resist mind magic well enough to win a one-on-one match against him, if he was pressed to use it.) And the whole _point_ of Morgenstern's was that it _wasn't_.

The owner had taken a page out of Anomos's book (almost literally), requiring all of his patrons to sign magically binding contracts to the effect that they consented to anything their opponents might try against them, limiting violence to the dueling stage, and refusing to testify about anything they might witness within the confines of the gym. It also helped that, while the entryway was located in Knockturn Alley, the arena itself was well outside British authority. (Severus suspected it was actually somewhere in Scandinavia, but it hardly mattered.)

The warlock, a regular called Raoul, scoffed at him. "Don't be getting overconfident there, boy. She's good, assuming she's got a decent match. Hard to show off if your opponent's out with one spell."

Well, that _was_ true, Severus supposed, but... "She?" he repeated, because the witch now being released from a petrification curse had definitely not put up anything _approaching _a good showing.

"Shapeshifter. Comes in to practice with different bodies. Uses a few different styles, too."

Well he supposed that made sense, if one planned on fighting in a body other than one's own. And it would be rather impossible to infiltrate groups like the Aurors or Hit Wizards if one couldn't use their style convincingly. "Metamorph?"

Raoul shrugged. "Could be. Could be a potion. Could be a body-snatcher even. Goes by Ariel."

"You keeping the floor, kid?" Morgenstern called.

"Unless there's someone here who can take it from me," the shapeshifter shouted back, winking at the handful of potential challengers hanging around the arena. Severus could have _sworn_ the kid caught his eye right before he did it.

Well, there wasn't much of a point coming here if he didn't get a chance to practice against someone who actually knew what they were doing. He shrugged. "I suppose I could stand another round or two," he drawled, making his way toward the circle.

As soon as he crossed the wards, he recognised the mind behind the unfamiliar face. He grinned, cast _muffliato_ with the slightest twitch of his wand. "Why Miss _Tonks_, what is a good little Auror like _you _doing in a place like _this_?"

She smirked back. "Looking for a rematch, at the moment."

Ah, yes... He _had_ fought her once, hadn't he, back in her seventh year. Filius used to ask him to come in and demonstrate the differences between dueling and _fighting_ for the Dueling Club on occasion, before assisting Minerva with the Deputy Head duties (which she didn't have time for because she was doing half of the Headmaster's job as well) had become too much of a drain on his time and the club fell apart. If he recalled correctly, Tonks had been _good_, for a schoolgirl. It wouldn't have surprised him if she'd decided to do a few years on the Circuit before applying to the Aurors (though of course she hadn't). But she hadn't had much experience fighting opponents who _didn't_ strictly obey the standard dueling code, even if he had still refrained from using illegal spells and properly dark curses. It hadn't been a difficult match.

"I hope you realise I have no intention of limiting my arsenal for _this_ match."

She snorted. "Yeah, well, five years makes a big difference, Snape. Bring it. Fuck, you can throw around the Unforgivables if you like, God knows real criminals do."

Severus wasn't certain whether he should be pleased or insulted to be excluded from the category of _real criminals_. He bit his tongue on the second quip that came to mind as well, something along the lines that he wasn't going to Avada her just for being an overconfident little twit, and he certainly didn't care to see her in pain.

"Mind magic?" he asked instead. Because if that was on the table, he didn't _need_ to use the Imperius.

She hesitated slightly, but after a moment, nodded.

_Are you sure?_ He whispered the thought into the front of her mind. She was a passable occlumens, apparently having learned to control the emotions she projected sufficiently to deceive casual observation, but using mind magic in a fight, when your opponent was actively trying to break in, was a very different thing to defend against. Especially when said opponent was a _natural_ legilimens. It was _difficult _for those who weren't to cast the legilimency charm silently _and _maintain it while also putting up both offense and defense. Severus, on the other hand, didn't really have to _try_.

She shoved his mind away from hers, a smooth, impenetrable barrier snapping into place around her. What the _hell_? It wasn't occlumency, but...some kind of charm to shield against mind magic? Maybe? It didn't feel like any mind-magic blocker he'd ever felt, though. He wondered if it foiled glamours and the like as well as freeform mental manipulations.

"I think I'll be fine," she said, her tone _very _cool. "Knives?"

Of course she would want to use a knife, it was part of the style the Blacks traditionally used. Andromeda wasn't truly a fighter, not like Bellatrix (or even Narcissa), but she would have learned as a child, and it was hardly surprising that she would have taught her daughter, if only in a futile attempt to improve her coordination _outside_ of situations where she wasn't acutely aware of it.

He shrugged. Nodded. He would be at a disadvantage without a second focus himself, but practicing under such conditions could hardly hurt. "Third blood?"

She gave him an exceedingly casual shrug. "I usually go to knock-out or yield."

That was fine with Severus. He nodded sharply, cancelling his anti-eavesdropping spell before informing Morgenstern of the terms they had agreed upon.

The fight that followed was one of the _strangest_ Severus had ever been involved in — almost more like an exhibition than an actual fight, opening comparatively slowly and escalating as they established each-other's degree of ability. Tonks's was, he grudgingly admitted (to himself, not to her) surprisingly high.

Not only was she _very _competent with the largely defensive DLE style, but when he switched to spells that were less easily blocked, she'd easily slipped into a more avoidant-offensive (traditional Black) style, using her knife to cast loosely-shaped cutting and breaking effects alongside her more sophisticated transfigurations (which were themselves comparatively difficult to block) between attempts to close the distance between them.

He'd begun using more elemental spells, then, in a bid to push her out of her comfort zone. Most mages would have quit when he started throwing fiendfire at them, but apparently Moody had taught her that ridiculous standing wave counter-spell of his, _and_ she had sufficient power and focus to crack the platform beneath his feet with her knife while holding it, throwing him off balance long enough to crush the cursed flames. He wasn't sure if she could have done it a second time, but that had annoyed her badly enough that she doubled down on her offensive magics, shifting to area effects which forced _him_ to adopt a more defensive style — his preference and the one he _had _been using was the one Bellatrix had trained the Death Eaters in, largely influenced by the Blacks' but far less fluid, emphasising an almost vampiric economy of movement which made it much more amenable to fighting in groups, using spells that had been specially adapted for faster casting to offset the slightly more limited mobility.

He misjudged a light bone-breaking curse, it sailed straight through the shield he'd thought would stop it, and lost his wand to the follow-up binding-disarming charm — Tonks reverting to her Auror training in the crucial moment. Which hurt like hell, crushing his arms against the ribs that had just been fractured, but was neither knock-out nor yield — she must be trying for the latter, he'd decided, simply for the satisfaction of forcing him to admit that she'd bested him — and was as vulnerable as any other limited-input spell to the effects of a freeform dispel.

Of course, that had left him exclusively with the options of dodging and freeform effects. He _was_ comparatively good at freeform magic — he had the channelling capacity to use it effectively at a reasonable distance, and it was similar in many ways to unstructured mind magic — but he would have been done for if Tonks hadn't _completely _underestimated him, if she'd switched to wide-area knockout spells rather than sticking with targeted effects. It would only have been a matter of time until he'd failed to split one sufficiently to avoid it. As it was, he'd managed to avoid being stunned long enough to frustrate her ("Bloody hell, Snape, you're more annoying to fight than _Lyra_, you know that?"), and used the distraction of her annoyance to pluck his wand out of her waistband and bring it back to himself — it was, of course, enchanted against simple summoning, but freeform levitation was hardly the same as a summoning charm.

Which gave him a chance to test the idea he'd had while wandless — that spell she was using to shield her mind, it was invulnerable to everything he'd tried throwing at it, but that, presumably, was because most mind magic, and most charms that emulated mind magic, worked along similar lines. Most mind-shielding spells were developed out of the same theoretical basis, designed specifically to counter them, leaving them vulnerable to various other shield-breakers. _This_ wasn't. It reminded him, in fact, of the one mind magic emulating charm that was otherwise entirely unblockable. If he didn't know better, he'd say someone in the Mind Division had found a way to invert the bloody Imperius, forming it into an unbreakable shield, rather than an unstoppable spear.

If that was the case, the Unforgivable _should_ shatter the thing — annihilate it, really. And if not, it would almost certainly pass straight through the mystery shield. It was, after all, Unforgivable because it _couldn't_ be blocked.

As it transpired, the former theory held true. The wide-eyed shock and fear that had flashed across the metamorph's face in the instant between her shield disappearing in a flash of magic that was nearly blinding to Severus's senses and his mental attack striking home was positively _delightful_.

_No, _No! _Fuck you, Snape, get out of my head! _

She'd snarled at him silently, her attempts to force him out pathetically ineffective, especially since he was so _very _annoyed over having been disarmed. There was absolutely _no _chance that he would let her go before he ended the match. It had taken him a few minutes to figure it out — it had been two _decades_ since he'd played puppetmaster, and it had never been one of his favorite tricks — but her attacks were, in the meanwhile, as ineffective as her attempts to dislodge him from her mind, given that he was in a position to anticipate them the moment she decided on a strategy. And when he _had _got the hang of it again, well...

There were _very _few things in life as satisfying as making a _very_ competent opponent stun herself.

Using the practice-Avada to peg her in the forehead with a bright green blob of paint during the minutes he spent poking about in her mind _did_ come close, though.

The only thing Tonks had to say for herself when he revived her was, "Mind magic is cheating, and you're a fucking freak," with a pout which might have been adorable on her usual features, but only made this face look a bit like Zabini trying to convince someone he _wasn't _a manipulative little sociopath.

He smirked down at her for a moment before offering her a hand up. Ignoring the fact that she _had_ agreed to his use of mind magic when they'd set the terms of the duel, "Dark wizards engaged in illegal activities _do_ tend to cheat when Aurors have them cornered. Did Moody neglect to mention that at any point in the past four years?"

"_No_," she muttered, her pout taking on a rather embarrassed quality. "Carmichael would be _livid_ if he knew you figured out how to break that shield in one fight."

And if he wasn't _very _dead.

"You holding the stage, Snape?"

"No, I think not." He might have won, yes, but it had hardly been an easy victory. Freeform effects were easier than _wandless_ spells, but still far more demanding than any proper shield charm. Following up the curses he'd turned aside while he'd been disarmed with an _Unforgivable_ had left him rather more tired than he cared to be while dueling with potentially lethal spells.

"Oh, good!" Tonks said, brightening immediately. "In that case you can take me to dinner and tell me how you knew that would work, and what the fuck you're doing here in the first place."

Severus sighed, following her out of the circle, then out of the arena entirely. "And why would I do that, precisely?"

"Um...sexual favors?" she offered, shrinking a few inches and reverting to one of her more familiar, more feminine faces. "Ah, that's better, I _hate_ staying exactly the same that long."

"If you're attempting to shock me, you'll have to try a bit harder than _that_, I'm afraid," Severus drawled. He managed to keep his voice even, but only just.

"I wasn't, actually. But if you're not interested, I'll settle for just dinner. Maybe drinks. And I think you'd do that because you've been starving _desperately_ for decent company since the end of the school year. You clearly don't know what to do with your time when you're not in classes or supervising detention twenty-seven hours a day. And also because if you don't, I'll tell Dumbledore you cast an Unforgivable at me."

"What makes you think he would care if he knew?" Severus asked, slightly amused in spite of himself. "Or that I would care if he did?"

"Oh, come on, you really think I'd believe he'd _approve_ of his pet Death Eater chucking Unforgivables at Aurors in public when he's already got serious political problems on his plate? And I'm sure he could find a way to make you care. I mean, it's not like Lyra doesn't cause enough trouble — if nothing else, he could find excuses to give her detentions with you every day for the foreseeable future."

"I...will concede that you may have a point, Miss Tonks. How very Slytherin of you."

More to the point, he had just remembered that the young Auror knew that Lyra was actually Bellatrix, and might therefore be included in her confidence in other matters, such as who else the infuriating child might have invited to assist in judging that bloody tournament. Severus was quite certain she wouldn't have stopped with a single letter to the ICW, and he would _very _much like to know who else was involved in this mad plan of hers so that he could come up with a strategy to counter the likely consequences, preferably before Dumbledore realised that there had been some _changes_ to the outline of the tournament. (He couldn't possibly know about it already, Severus would _definitely_ have heard about it if he did.) Dinner (and maybe drinks) with a smart-mouthed Hufflepuff was a small price to pay if it would net him that information. Especially since he did actually enjoy Miss Tonks's company, even if he was about as likely to admit it as she was to actually shag him.

"The Hat did offer me Slytherin, but decided you might try to set it on fire again if it did that to you, and also the world really doesn't need a second Adara Zabini, so. Shall we?"

"How the hell does the Hat know about Adara Zabini?" he asked, following as she led the way out onto the darkening alleyway. Zabini was under the impression that his great-aunt had attended Beauxbatons.

The witch shrugged. "Mirabella, I presume. Or, you know, maybe Fawkes takes it out on occasion. Or Dumbledore, I guess, but Fawkes would be funnier. Just flaming out of nowhere, dropping it on some random person's head to catch up with the news... Where are we going?"

"I was under the impression that _you _had invited _me_ out this evening."

"No, I told you that you were taking me out. There's a difference. Namely, you have to decide where we're going."

"You are ridiculous."

"It's part of my charm. So?"

Severus sighed. It was probably a good thing, really, that she was letting him choose. She, of course, could look like anyone, but people _would_ notice that Severus Snape, ex- Death Eater (or spy), notorious misanthropist, and the bane of every incompetent Hogwarts Potions student's existence for the past thirteen years, was out in public _with someone else_. Almost, possibly, as though he might be on a _date_. It hardly _mattered _with _whom_ — if he wasn't careful, they'd be in the _Prophet_'s gossip column tomorrow morning. "I presume you don't mind something...exotic?"

Tonks beamed at him, her hair growing pink again. "I _love_ exotic. Where are we going?"

"It's a _surprise_, Miss Tonks." Severus turned on his heel to lead them deeper into the depths of Knockturn Alley, seeking out the oldest parts of it, the side-alleys so narrow that the upper stories of the dilapidated buildings on either side nearly touched and he had to light his wand to lead the way; so thoroughly abandoned that entire ecosystems had sprung up within them, from glowing, magical lichen and fungi to several dozen species of beetles and spiders to mimmoths and puffskeins to feral kneazles hunting doxies, only to be hunted in turn by rodents of unusual size and the most desperate of the hags the Ministry had forced out of the surrounding muggle city.

Tonks, obviously growing more uncertain the further they went, tucked a hand into the crook of his arm. "Er...Snape? Not to be, I don't know, _overly particular_, but what the fuck kind of restaurant are you taking me to? Because there's nothing down this way but...well, _nothing_, is there?"

"Are you _blind_, Tonks? There are dozens of rare and valuable potions ingredients around here. That's night-blooming selas, for example," he noted, pointing out a vine that had taken over a collapsed ruin since the last time he'd been down here. He'd have to come back and collect some later. "And right around this corner is..."

Tonks gasped as they rounded the corner, stepping through a natural portal, a hole torn in the universe by the weight of magic and history in the place, or perhaps created by some ancient people from another world. It was invisible on their side, but as soon as they stepped through it was obvious that something had changed, the cobblestones cleaner, the alley wider. There were people about as well, carrying on with their evening's business as though two people stepping out of nowhere was entirely normal. Which, to be fair, it was, here.

"Is this the _Crossroads_?! Mum always said... But I thought that was just a story!"

It was indeed. The Crossroads was a veritable Swiss cheese of a universe, possibly artificial, consisting of a single isolated city — not very large — with hundreds of portals leading to it (or from it, if this was where they'd all been created), to various sites in different worlds: the oldest, most magically charged places in magical settlements across dozens of alternative timelines and dimensions. According to the stories — myths and rumors, nothing more, for no one could ever seem to identify the friend of their brother-in-law's cousin who happened to stumble across it once and brought back said story — one could find _anything_ in the Crossroads. Generally exactly what one needed to complete the quest demanded by the narrative, but nevertheless.

In reality, Severus had discovered, it was home to a small population of refugees from other worlds and a much larger number of passers-through and tourists. (Apparently there were other worlds where the existence of this one was far better publicised.) Severus had wandered into it while hunting for potions ingredients several years ago, and knew of only one other person who had found it. Claire O'Rourke, a cursebreaker and mind mage working for Gringotts, had once mentioned (in passing, several years before he'd found it) that she lived here when she wasn't on assignment for the Bank. At the time he'd thought she was making some obscure joke. He'd written her after he stumbled upon it, and she'd given him directions to a few universes he might want to visit, and a few other portals back into their own, or at least others that were very similar to their own, if not exactly the same.

"It is, I assure you, very real," he informed the wide-eyed girl at his side.

"We're— Are we— When you said _exotic_, I thought you meant Indian takeaway or something, not going to dinner in the bloody _Crossroads_!"

"We're going to dinner in Byzántion." Byzántion _Lamed_, technically — a world parallel to their own, with a somewhat different history, but Tonks was clearly already on the verge of being overwhelmed with childish delight, so he decided it was hardly necessary to tell her that. "This is just a short-cut."

"This is _amazing_! Though I have to say, I have no idea how you could possibly top this on a second date." Severus very nearly tripped over his own feet, looking down at the oblivious metamorph in shock. "I mean, usually blokes leave a little room to upgrade, you know, they don't just take you to the _coolest place ever_ right off the mark."

"_Date_?" he repeated. Granted, he hadn't wanted to go somewhere in Diagon because people might _think_ he was on a date, but _he_ hadn't actually thought he was.

She grinned up at him. "If it wasn't before, it definitely is now."

_Well...okay, then._ Severus had no idea what to think about this. He didn't actually remember the last time he'd been on anything that might be considered a date. In fact, it was entirely possible he'd _never_ been on anything that might be considered a date. Er...the occasional dinner with a colleague at a conference? He and Aurora just sniped at each other in passing and occasionally fucked when one or both of them were particularly stressed, or had had enough to drink that it seemed like a good idea.

Best just...act normal, he supposed. She could _hardly _expect anything else.

"So kind of you to inform me. Left, here."

* * *

"Tonks."

"Tonks."

"_Nymphadora_."

"Don' call me that," Dora said to whoever she'd brought home last night, burrowing her face into her pillow. She'd been having such a good dream. Yeah, it was _weird_ — like, alternate dimension weird — mixed with incredibly mundane, just going out on a dinner date, but completely _surreal_, couldn't possibly ever happen mundane, if that was even a thing, because she'd been on a dinner date with _Professor Snape._ And then...

_Your alarm has been going off for fifteen minutes. You really must get up._

"Gah!" She startled into wakefulness at the thought slipped directly into her mind, the tone dry and sardonic and so altogether _Snape-ish_ that... _Oh, my God, that...wasn't a dream. We actually...and I..._

"Good morning, Nymphadora," the man said waspishly, his voice muffled by the pillow he'd buried his own head under, presumably hiding from the morning sunlight flooding her flat. "No, that wasn't a dream, and yes, we did go out to dinner, and then you _did_ propose that we go back to your place, get smashed, and shag each other's brains out. In precisely those words. And proceeded to follow through on that plan because, in your words, again, _it's fucking hot when people just, _know what they're doing_, like they're just _so good_, and... I'm too drunk to explain _why_, okay, and _way _too horny to spend any more time thinking about it, just take your fucking pants off._"

That...did sound like something she'd say. Even the exasperated tone he'd mimicked sounded like her. It wasn't often that anyone made her wait when she was throwing herself at them, she'd been known to get impatient on the rare occasion that they did. "Being really fucking good at what you do — extreme competence, I guess — is _hot_, and you're a fucking genius and I had _no idea_ you could fight like that, and you took me to the fucking _Crossroads _— to a _whole other universe_, for _dinner_, on a _whim_, and... You're just a very impressive person, okay."

Snape muttered something, she couldn't make it out with the pillow over his face.

"What was that?" she asked, snatching it away.

He squinted, glared at her. "I _said_, you're not so bad yourself. You would've had me if you'd been a bit more decisive when you got me off-guard."

Dora grinned. Had he set that up for her deliberately? "Really? Because I seem to recall you being so off-guard that you were thoroughly unable to resist my having you. _Twice_. Though I'm sure I could be _more_ decisive, if you're into that sort of thing."

His face twisted into a grimace. "Not my cup of tea. Speaking of which...is there coffee around here somewhere? If you're going to refuse to turn off your alarm at the unholy hour of _six_, the least you could do—"

Dora cut off his grumbling with a yelp as he reminded her that she was running late — he'd thrown some sort of silencing at her clock, she'd completely forgotten that was why he'd woken her in the first place. Followed by another yelp as she attempted to get out of her bed and promptly stumbled into the sharp corner of her wardrobe. _Why the fuck is one of my legs longer than the other?!_ At least she had two arms this morning — she'd been known to occasionally morph one away in her sleep to make spooning more comfortable.

Apparently Snape didn't snuggle. Somehow she wasn't surprised.

When she managed to pull herself back to her feet, minor leg-length discrepancy sorted, Snape was laughing at her. "I may have to retract my earlier statement regarding your skills."

"Oh, shut up. If you're awake enough to mock me, you clearly don't need that coffee after all."

He groaned. "No, I could mock you in my sleep. Where's the coffee?"

"Kitchen."

"_Obviously_..."

"It's not like it's a huge flat, I'm sure you can find it," she snapped, waving vaguely toward the doorway as she hunted through a pile of clean clothes for uniform trousers, regretting for perhaps the thousandth time that past-Dora couldn't be arsed to hang things up properly. (Probably wouldn't make her any more likely to hang them up next time either, though.)

By the time she arrived in the kitchen, Snape was seated at her tiny table, mug in hand, glaring disapprovingly at the door, just _waiting_ for her to enter, the piles of dirty dishes she'd been avoiding scrubbing for days washing themselves behind him. (She was bloody _terrible_ at household charms, that was most of the reason the housekeeping never got done.) "How you live like this, I will _never_ understand."

"Are you— What the fuck?"

"You hadn't any clean _mugs_."

"So...you just thought you'd wash the dishes?" He raised an eyebrow at her. _Obviously_. "I mean," she added quickly, "I'm not complaining, just...you really didn't have to..."

"Did you miss my saying you hadn't any clean mugs?"

He was judging her, she could feel it from here. _This is an impromptu examination of your qualifications as an independent adult, Miss Tonks, and I regret to inform you that you have been found _wanting, she imagined. Or _some _suitably Snape-like and generally disapproving mockery, anyway.

"Well, you could have just rinsed one out, they've only had coffee in them— No, what are we even talking about? Forget the fucking mugs! I need to go, Moody's going to kill me if I'm late, and Penderghast's going to spend the whole morning trying to get me to tell him who I'm shagging — don't worry, I won't tell him it's _you_, wouldn't want to ruin your reputation, after all—"

"So considerate of you," he interjected, still sitting there calmly, sipping his coffee and glaring at her as though she'd muffed a first-year potion.

"Ha bloody _ha_. But I need to go, which means _you _need to go, so go put some bloody clothes on, Snape!"

He sighed, as though this was an _incredible_ inconvenience to him — honestly, she had no idea what he was complaining about, he was already _up_, he had his fucking coffee. Honestly she was a little surprised he hadn't gotten dressed before he'd woken her, he seemed like the sort of bloke who would feel all defenseless and vulnerable without six layers of cloth between them, or half a bottle of rum, but what did she know?

"Go!"

"You know, it's generally considered polite to at least _offer_ breakfast," he drawled sarcastically, taking his sweet time meandering back to her bedroom — probably revenge for having to get up in the first place.

"And here I thought it was rude to offer food to an anorexic!" _Am I out of cream cheese? Bugger!_

Snape didn't respond to her jab at his eating habits, so when he _finally _reappeared, wearing the same casual dueling trousers and tunic he'd been wearing at Morgenstern's, she added, "If you don't want to get up in the morning, Tuesday's my day off," and threw a piece of toast at him.

He caught it, of course, though he made a face at getting his fingers all buttery. "Am I to take it that you...wish to repeat last night's..."

"What, you don't? Maybe less alcohol, everything's a bit fuzzy, but yeah. Monday?"

"Er..."

"Brill, pick me up at eight. It's still your job to pick the restaurant, by the way."

Snape managed to wipe the astonishment off his face with obvious effort. "Fine. But if I have to pick the restaurant, I also get to choose where we go afterward. Which will not be here," he said, eyeing the piles of paperwork she'd been meaning to file for _months_, his distaste clear.

"Well, excuse _me_, I figured you wouldn't want to bring me back to the school, but—"

"Don't be ridiculous, I _do _have a house."

Dora nearly dropped her toast. "You _do_? Here I thought you just, you know, camped out in one of the old storerooms, or something." Well, that was a bit of an exaggeration, but she knew he had rooms in the school like all the other professors, she'd sort of figured they just lived there year-round.

He raised an eyebrow at her. What he meant by it, she had no idea. That expression could mean anything, really.

"Aren't you going to be late?" he said, disapparating with the slightest _pop_ before she could answer, the smooth, sarcastic bastard.

_So_, she thought, _that...happened_. Not that she was _displeased_ about it, or anything. Obviously, she _had _pretty much demanded a second date. She just... Well, she'd never expected that she'd actually manage to seduce _Severus Snape_, of all people.

And she _definitely _wouldn't have expected him to be that good.

She stared at the spot he'd vanished from for several seconds before the chiming of her communication mirror startled her from her reverie.

"Yeah, sorry, Mad-Eye, overslept— Yes, I'm on my— _No_, I was _literally _disapparating when you called! Yeah, right, meet you there..."

* * *

_So, yeah, Leigha wrote those scenes in AAtP with Severus and Dora running into each other for one reason or another, and then this happened. Wasn't originally part of the plan, we still don't know for sure where we're going with it (if anywhere). Because, well, pretty much all of the developments we come up with for this fic could boil down to "it seemed like a good idea at the time..." _xD

_—Lysandra_


	21. Loose Cannon Cop

"So," Dora said, shifting uncomfortably in her chair. "What am I doing here?"

_Here _was Mad-Eye's surprisingly..._normal_-looking sitting room. If she didn't know better, she'd say he'd just commandeered some random muggle house for their meeting, it _was_ in the middle of a muggle suburb, after all. But she'd felt the wards examine her when she entered, and there were no electrics anywhere. There were also no pieces of furniture that anyone could hide behind or under or even on top of — the book-shelves set into the corner went all the way to the ceiling. Tables were glass and the chairs were all spindly, modern-looking things. The bed (when she'd claimed a need to use the loo and gone snooping) was set directly on the floor, and the shower had a glass stall rather than a curtain. There were no blinds or curtains on any of the windows (one-way obscuring charms hiding their goings-on from anyone outside) or doors on the closets (or cupboards) and foe-glasses were set in various corners of the ceiling, allowing one to observe the entirety of any room one happened to be in from any spot, even if one didn't have a creepy enchanted eye that could see through the back of one's head. After all, the Mad Eye wouldn't help him identify someone under polyjuice or any number of other disguising potions and enchantments.

It was _definitely _Moody's house, is what she was trying to say. Which, it was really _fucking_ weird that he'd asked her to come here, he never told _anyone_ where he lived, claimed it was part of the price you paid if you wanted to live past the age of forty in this business. (Some people _had_ to know where he lived, of course, but probably only like, Dumbledore, and maybe Lady Bones.)

Moody engaged the privacy wards on the room before he answered, a few flicks of his wand bringing oppressive, stifling magic down on them, so suddenly Dora had trouble breathing there, for a second.

"Bloody _hell_, Mad-Eye. Overkill much?"

"No such thing, Tonks," he growled. "You're here because I've got an offer for you. An offer that I'll deny ever having made, if you turn it down."

_Er..._ "Are you trying to get into my knickers? All you had to do was _ask_, you know."

Mad-Eye gave her a _look_, like that was the stupidest thing she'd done since she'd ambushed him looking like Bellatrix Lestrange (which wasn't _nearly _so funny in hindsight, now that she was _out_), but didn't even address her guess. Which had only been _partly _facetious. She really couldn't imagine _what _he might have to say that warranted this degree of secrecy.

"I'm retiring next week," he said, rather abruptly.

Well, that was...

_Seriously?_

Okay, the thing was, he'd been _planning _on retiring three years ago. He'd stayed on specifically to train _Dora_, or so Kingsley had told her, once, after a particularly shite day of training, when she'd been venting to him about her sadistic SA and his insane standards. Which was, on the one hand, kind of flattering. But on the other hand, she'd kind of always thought she'd just been a convenient excuse.

She'd honestly figured he'd keep coming up with reasons to put off leaving until he died on the training field, because he'd also _almost _retired back in Eighty-One, when the War ended and Sirius, who had been his junior partner at the time, was revealed to have been a traitor, and Adamant Smith put his foot down and declared that anyone with as many years and injuries under his belt as Moody _really _shouldn't be an active field agent anymore — he'd managed to parley the play to stick him behind a desk into training the fresh recruits and stayed on because he was convinced that Smith, a Death Eater sympathiser, was trying to force him to quit.

Then in Eighty-Four, Turpin had cleaned house and Amelia Bones had become the Head of the DLE. She tried to promote him to Head Auror, aka Head Paper-Pusher, only backed off when he threatened to quit first — she really _did _want to keep him around to maintain order through the transition period. And in Eighty-_Six_, Scrimgeour had begun to object to some of the not-strictly-regulation practices and procedures he'd been training the new recruits to observe. (Moody had lost that one, been forced to stop teaching new recruits to resist torture and take excessively paranoid measures to maintain mission security. Though he'd still put _her _through Unforgivable resistance training, under strictest secrecy. She could only assume he'd done the same for others he trusted not to rat him out.) In Eighty-Nine, after a rather nasty training accident had left him in hospital for a month, Bones had tried to force him into a more advisory role, leaving the active training to younger mages. With more of their original limbs. (Dora didn't know _how_ he'd avoided that one.)

He had celebrated his forty-fifth anniversary with the Aurors on Lammas of Ninety-One (because the entire department had forced a party on him). In the months leading up to it, Dumbledore had convinced him to call that a good run, or so she'd heard. Until he'd realised that there was a Black metamorph in that year's incoming cohort of trainees, according to Kingsley. (Never mind that she wasn't a Black.)

The only time she'd legitimately thought he might _do it_ was last year, when she'd brought him the file she'd put together on Sirius. It had been a hell of a blow to his confidence, learning that his former partner had been innocent the whole time, but she'd thought he deserved to know before she'd brought it to Bones. He'd spent _months_ going over old case files, reassuring himself that he hadn't accidentally condemned anyone else to a lifetime of hell on earth.

"But... What about Bellatrix?" Because killing or recapturing Bellatrix was, she'd thought, their highest-priority project, she couldn't _imagine_ Moody wasn't going to finangle his way onto the task force, even if it _was_ in a completely paper-pushing, advisory role, because he'd made it _perfectly_ clear to Dora that he didn't believe anyone else capable of tracking the bitch down. He wasn't entirely confident that _he_ would be able to do it, or that he'd be able to take her down when he did — he wasn't nearly as young as he once was — but he _was_ confident that he had a better understanding of Dora's insane auntie (and what she was likely to do now that she was at large) than anyone else in the Corp.

His twisted old face creased slightly on one side, the lines around his eyes crinkling in what would have been a sardonic smile on a more expressive, less scarred man. "The Aurors are never going to apprehend that madwoman. She's gone to ground on the Continent."

"What? How—?"

"Just got word from a friend of mine in Rome. Pair of Hunters slaughtered tracking Greyback's pack somewhere east of Warsaw. Known associates. Might even call them _friends_, if the Blackheart _had_ friends. Signatures were faded, took the damn fools too long to follow up when communication ceased, but they're not inconsistent with the records we have on Black, and the memories of the scene itself... It was her. I'd know her work anywhere, fucking nightmare bitch."

Dora didn't ask him to elaborate. She'd seen the memories they'd screened for the Aurors, and the aftermath of her escape. And Snape had had...very _ambivalent _things to say about Bellatrix when she'd asked him to tell her what they were up against. She was pretty sure he'd been trying to be objective, but it wasn't really a secret that Snape had joined the Death Eaters because he'd been a stupid, angry teenager obsessed with dark magic.

Or, well, most people probably didn't know that, actually, but he'd let enough hints slip over the years to put it together. Mostly when he'd been talking her out of doing something incredibly stupid herself when she was an angry teenager. Like murdering Damien Stryke, or that fucker Maccabee. Sure, she would have had to flee the country afterward, but she'd probably have gotten away with it. It was infamously difficult to track down a metamorph who didn't want to be found.

Whatever, the point was, she was pretty sure that when Snape told her that Bellatrix and the Dark Lord had considered the War a _game_ (one that the Light had taken all too seriously, and _still _not been able to win); killing an art; and torture an act of intimacy, something to be _savored_, when he said she was the most talented killer he'd ever known, and the most dangerous, Dora was pretty sure that there was some degree of admiration and respect beneath his hatred for her, and that thin facade of principled condemnation.

And it took a _lot_ to impress Severus Snape. Even more to get him to _admit_ it.

"So, she's not in Britain, she's not our problem, you're _actually _going to _retire_ and– and _what_? Raise kneazles? Take up horticulture? You'd _actually _go mad inside a month!"

The old warlock's smirk broadened into a recognisable grin. "Never had a hobby, Tonks, and I'm too old to start one now. But no one ever said I had to spend my retirement in Britain. I hear Poland's supposed to be nice this time of year. Maybe Belarus."

_What. _"You— Oh, my God. You're going after her _yourself_? But, why are you telling _me_?"

"Well. That's the question, isn't it. See, if I _were_ thinking of looking up an old..._friend_ while I was in the area, I might be in the market for a travelling companion. A travelling companion who has her own reasons to want a sabbatical, one who's been questioning whether she knows what she wants to do with her life, maybe."

Dora found herself sitting down on one of the spindly modern chairs _much _more quickly than she intended. "_What_? I— You want me to go with you? _Me_. _Why_? And— No, just _why_."

Moody chuckled. "You broke secrecy. You told Andromeda about Black's escape."

"Wha—? She _told_ you?!"

"_I_ told _her_. And asked her to let me know when _you_ got around to telling her. Three days?"

"Two," she admitted, trying not to sound as guilty about that as she felt. "I wasn't read in until the day after it happened."

Moody gave her a one-shouldered, half-hearted shrug. "Can't say I expected you to get there so quickly. But then, you _have _been turning it over for a while now, haven't you. Duty and conscience. Aurors or family. Could've told you, Blacks always choose family, in the end."

"I'm not a Black," Dora pointed out. She'd been telling people that pretty much since the first day she'd come to Britain, and no one _ever_ believed it.

"Is that so? What would Bella's little girl have to say about that?"

"Lyra?" Dora had been under the impression that Moody was certain Bellatrix had never had a child.

"Seen any other miniature Bellatrixes running around Britain lately?"

"She's not— Never mind. I don't see what her opinion has to do with anything. I'm not a member of her House. Not even under their matrilineal recognition rule. Mum left them before I was born." Yes, they'd recognise her in a heartbeat if she agreed, Lyra had already offered, but she _liked_ her independence, thanks very much.

"She still named you after one of them. Taught you to fight and think like one of them. Paddy all but admitted it, once — a family like that, you can leave them, but they never really leave _you_."

The conversation stalled, fell into an uneasy silence. Dora couldn't really deny _that_, after all. Even if she wanted to, which she wasn't entirely sure she did. After a moment she said, "Anyway, if I _was_ one of them, and they always choose their family over everyone else, shouldn't you want me as far from Bellatrix as possible?"

Moody shrugged. "Paddy also told me that you can't choose your family, best you can do is kill off the ones you don't like."

Dora snorted at that, trying not to laugh. Mum had told her that, too, after the first time she'd met Narcissa Malfoy. "So...you want me to– to come to fucking _Belarus_ with you to hunt down a psychotic mass murderer, who I happen to be related to, because I chose my family over my duty to the Aurors."

"No. Not because you chose family over the Aurors. Because you chose to follow your conscience rather than the rules." He offered her another almost-smirk. "Doesn't hurt that you've got more potential than any recruit I've trained since they dissolved Foreign and Domestic."

Foreign and... "The Office of Foreign and Domestic Affairs? You were a fucking _Black Cloak_?" No wonder he was such a paranoid old hardarse. And even _less _wonder the Aurors had given him so much latitude over the years. Dora was _sure_ no one else would have been able to get away with Imperiusing new recruits as a training exercise, or deputising half a dozen civilians to storm a vampire den, or blackmailing known dark wizards into serving as unofficial personal informants.

"Never did like that nickname. Operations Agent. Still am, if it comes down to it. A Lord can call his Left Hand whatever he likes, the job doesn't change."

That was...a hell of a way to put it, really. Not an inaccurate one — the Black Cloaks _had_, basically, been the Left Hand of Magical Britain when it came to dealing with the muggle British Empire and the magical communities it encompassed. Just...

The Office of Foreign and Domestic Affairs had been disbanded almost fifty years ago. "The job doesn't _exist_ anymore, Mad-Eye."

"As long as problems like _Bellatrix_ exist, it does. I took my vows in Nineteen Nineteen. Swore to uphold the Statute, protect the people, and keep the peace throughout the Empire. By _whatever means necessary_, until my last breath. The Head of Operations, the Minister, even the Queen Herself doesn't have the authority to release me from those vows, short of demanding my life. Most of us kept on when they decommissioned us — the Agents who escaped Grindelwald's purge, I mean. A couple dozen of us, all told. Joined the Aurors or the Diplomatic Corp. A few struck out on their own, doing what needed to be done outside the letter of the law. But none of them _retired_. None of them _quit_. They died as they lived, upholding the Statute, protecting the people, and keeping the peace. I'm the last of us left, now, and I intend to do the same, because the job still needs doing. The job will _always_ need doing," he said, fixing her with the hardest, most challenging glare she'd ever seen from him, the Mad Eye drilling into her own as though he was examining her very _soul_.

Was he— He couldn't possibly be asking what she thought he was asking.

"And you... You want me to come with you." He nodded. "And...and be like...an apprentice Black Cloak. _Operations Agent_, whatever."

He nodded again. "Some people aren't cut out for enforcing the _law_, but that doesn't mean they can't do a lot of good in this world, if they're willing to get their hands dirty. I won't lie to you, it's a hard life. Spying. Killing. Takes a toll on you. On your soul. You'll do things you never thought you could, make choices you hate yourself for making. And it's lonely. Friends, family, they're liabilities. Working in the shadows to help the light, you make a lot of enemies on both sides. But the work needs doing. Are you in or out, Tonks?"

Dora snorted, just a little, at his overly-dramatic tone. Didn't he just say he'd asked her because he already _knew_ she'd do what she thought was right, no matter the consequences? She could be fired for telling Mum about Bellatrix's escape. She _should_ be fired for not telling the Aurors who Lyra really was, especially since Dora was — when she was willing to admit it to herself — about ninety percent sure Lyra was a black mage, the same as Bellatrix. Not to mention, she hadn't actually told anyone (other than Snape, who obviously already knew) that Lyra was lying about not remembering what had happened to her, or Harry. That was actually _obstructing justice_. Forget being _fired_, she could actually go to Azkaban for that.

And she'd spent the better part of the past fifteen _years_ coming to terms with the idea that she was going to outlive all her friends and family by _millennia_. (Potentially. Assuming she didn't do anything _really stupid_. Which...wasn't really guaranteed, Mum _did_ say that an unhealthy disregard for personal safety ran in the family. _Both_ sides — Dad had married her, after all.) The thing about being _functionally immortal_ was...well, after a few centuries, a person didn't really belong anywhere, anymore. Isolating herself to do a job would...probably only make it easier, honestly, at least for the first few lifetimes. At least it would be a _normal _reason to avoid making close connections with people. Well...normal-_ish_. And if she decided she _did _want to try to do the whole friends and family thing at some point, it wasn't like she couldn't live two entirely separate lives.

This was probably the sort of thing she should think about a lot more than this, one of those major, life-changing decisions. Especially since, well... She'd probably think a lot more about actually swearing those vows of Moody's — life-long commitments were a _big deal_ when you were going to live as long as she (probably) was. But just...going with him, helping him stop Bellatrix? She didn't _have_ to think about it, really.

She _had_ joined the Aurors in the first place because she'd wanted to help people. Protect people who couldn't protect themselves. And there had been times already, in just a couple of years on the force, that she'd found herself thinking that she could help a lot more people if they could just..._do_ things. Work outside the system instead of having to follow protocol.

There was a part of her that thought — had _always _thought — that it would be better to just kill some people, not give them a chance to escape justice just because they had money or connections, or because people couldn't quite _prove_ they were guilty, even though everyone _knew_. People like Malfoy or Nott or any of the other Death Eaters who still held power and influence in Britain. People who tortured and killed and terrorised people for kicks like Bellatrix or Greyback. Rapist pedophile bastards like Maccabee. Damian Stryke. If Lockhart hadn't managed to destroy his own mind last year, he wouldn't have been convicted for his crimes. He would have been humiliated, his career ruined, but he would never have seen justice for the people whose deeds and memories he had stolen. If Moody thought she wouldn't sleep just fine, killing people who needed to be killed, he was giving her too much credit.

(Of course, it probably said bad things about her character that she was so very certain of that, but that didn't mean it wasn't true. If Snape wasn't such a nosey bastard she _would_ have offed Maccabee back in Eighty-Seven. Hufflepuff prefects took the safety of their underclassmen _very seriously_.)

And besides, who _hadn't _wanted to be a Black Cloak when they were a kid?

She grinned. "Oh, I'm in. I'm _so_ in."

* * *

_Maccabee was the Defense professor of '87/'88, Dora's fifth year. Assaulted first and second-year girls. Dora found out about it because one of her ickle firsties asked her prefect what to do about not wanting to go to Defense, and, well... the only reason she didn't kill him was Snape convincing her that death is too good for someone like that. He's currently in Azkaban._

_Damian Stryke, a Gryffindor in Dora's class, poisoned a Hufflepuff girl with a poorly-brewed love potion the next year. Dumbledore let him off with a slap on the wrist because he didn't want to ruin the boy's life over a single poor choice. Snape and Sinistra poisoned him with a potion that caused him to be obsessed with his reflection, almost pining to death before his roommates finally dragged him to the Hospital Wing. —Leigha_

_So...that's **two** people Dora nearly murdered before leaving Hogwarts. And she claims she isn't a Black. Sure, Dora. Sure. —Lysandra_

_It would have taken Dora all of two seconds to join the Order, so, something like this was always going to happen. Just a little early this time. —Leigha_


	22. Bad Life Choices

"So, I should probably tell you I'm not going to be here next week. I'm going to be out of the country for, well... I don't know when I'll be back, actually."

Severus allowed his head to flop to one side to look at Tonks. Her hair was a sweaty mess of bright blue curls, her eyes, only inches away from his own, an unnatural violet. Her face was rather androgynous, but she had kept the rest of her body female in deference to the fact that, if he was going to be lying naked in a bed with someone, he preferred women.

He wasn't entirely in the mood to move at the moment, but he really did feel that that comment deserved a raised eyebrow. "If you're not enjoying this arrangement, you _can_ simply tell me. You needn't flee the country to avoid me."

Not that he actually thought she _wasn't_ enjoying herself — this _was_ the third time they had "hooked up" (as she claimed the kids were calling it these days). Severus still didn't quite understand _why_. Young, vivacious Nymphadora Tonks could almost certainly have anyone she chose, and despite her insistence that competence was sexy and half the Slytherins who'd hit puberty wanted to "bang" him (which was an exaggeration, but yes, he knew, he tried not to think about it), he didn't exactly consider himself a catch.

He was quite certain, however, that if she _hadn't _been entirely satisfied with his performance, she never would have demanded a second "date", let alone a third.

"Stupid doesn't suit you." Her response — the dry, sarcastic tone and the fact that she hadn't missed a beat more than the words — drew a hint of amusement from him, a smirk forcing its way onto his face. "We're definitely doing this again. I just don't know when. This mission isn't exactly the sort of thing you can take a day off from, you know?"

Severus let his eyes narrow in suspicion.

"I'm going to be undercover," she elaborated defensively, which did not allay his suspicion in the slightest.

Going undercover, on a secret mission that she couldn't take a day off from — it wasn't as though it should be much of an impediment to pop back to Hogsmeade or come here for a few hours if she really wanted to, travel wasn't exactly _difficult_ for mages, and it wasn't as though anyone had to know any particular person was _her_... Unless she would be with someone who would notice and disapprove of her _absence_. And hadn't she said she would be out of the country? Assuming she wasn't lying, which she had no reason to do, especially since she'd just inadvertently suggested she was working a case illegally, outside her jurisdiction...

Severus groaned. "_Please_ tell me that old madman hasn't convinced you to try to hunt down Bellatrix."

"What? _No_." That was definitely a lie.

"She's going to kill you, Tonks, you know that, right?"

"She's not going to kill me."

Well if _that_ wasn't gross overconfidence... "Why wouldn't she? Yes, you're family, but she _has_ killed Blacks before. Dozens of them, it was her Mastery project." Well, according to rumor, at least. He had no reason to doubt it, though.

"Yeah, but how many of them were Aurors?"

None, though many of them had been far more paranoid and dangerous than Aurors. "How many Aurors do you think she killed in the War?" A hint of unease appeared in the lines around her eyes. "And speaking of being an Auror, you _are_ aware of the boundaries of your jurisdiction, are you not?"

She glared at him. "Yes. I am. And I'm also aware that I have a duty to uphold! Someone has to protect the people. If I don't stop her, who will?"

"Lovegood? Pfeiffer?" There _were_ mages out there who made it their business to hunt down evil bitches like Bellatrix — much more experienced mages than Tonks, who _didn't _have a law-enforcement career to lose because an insane...ex... "What lies _has_ Moody been feeding you, Tonks? I hate to break it to you, but the Black Cloaks were _hardly _the noble, romantic figures they play in children's tales."

She sputtered incoherently at him for a second or two before falling into a pouting glare. "How the fuck do you just..._do _that? I mean, I might not be able to stop you, but I _know_ you're not in my head right— No one said anything _about_ Black Cloaks. Or Mad-Eye, for that matter!"

Ignoring (with effort) the sudden resemblance between his...lover and her aunt ("_How the fuck do you do that, just fucking _know _what I did?"_), Severus sneered at her. "You didn't have to, there's only one person you respect enough to _incendio _your career for, and only one who'd have the gall to ask you to do it."

She rolled away, glared at the ceiling. "Fuck you, Snape."

"I cannot think of a single person less suited to the life of a Black Cloak than you." That wasn't actually true — he was sure he could think of less suited candidates if he took a moment, and Tonks probably _could_ do the job — but it would _ruin_ her. For all her experience as an Auror, she was still so _very_...well, innocent, in many ways. Dangerous, yes, but her hands were clean.

She sat up to turn her glare on him, fury practically radiating from her. "And you would know _so_ much about it."

"Wouldn't I?" he scoffed. "Black Cloaks were diplomats, spies, and assassins — _were_," he repeated for emphasis. "No matter what Moody's told you, the two of _you_, if you actually go through with this– this _insane_ proposition, would be no better than criminals yourselves, vigilantes hunting down your quarry with absolutely _no_ authority whatsoever, so you'd hardly be in a position to further diplomacy. No, this mission, this _crusade_, is a _covert operation_. And that life... Take it from someone who has _been _a spy, you stupid girl, it's not glamourous. It's not _fun_. It's dirty and miserable, lying and gaining people's trust with the express intention of betraying them. You make decisions you wish you didn't have to, you get people _killed_ — people you _like_, people who _trusted_ you. And then, if you're doing your job _well_, you go back and lie to their friends as well, convince them you had nothing to do with their loss, convince them that you're still with them. The fact that you'll genuinely mourn their losses does, I'll admit, make that easier, but—"

"Fuck off, Snape!" she interrupted — not quite as forcefully as he was certain she'd meant to, he could hear the doubt creeping into her tone. He opened his mouth to continue, but she cut him off. "No! Stop it. I'm not you. I'm— It's not going to be like that. We're just going to find Bellatrix and stop her, and—"

She cut herself off, shrugging on her robes. Clearly she would _not _be staying the night after all. She might very well leave and never come back. But he couldn't just...let her ruin her life in the same way he had, and Regulus, and so many others. Without understanding the consequences of her decisions.

Trying to at least make her _think_ about it — even if he suspected she wouldn't listen, even if she told him to go fuck himself and never spoke to him again — was _literally _the least he could do.

"Do you really think you can? Setting aside the fact that Bellatrix has been doing this longer than you've been alive, the fact that she could — that she probably _will_ — kill you without breaking a sweat, if she was sitting here, smirking at you like little _Lyra _all grown up, dangerous, yes, and _evil_, but so very compelling, do you truly think you have it in you to kill someone — to _execute_ them in cold blood?"

"If it's Bellatrix? _Yes_. She may be a charismatic cunt, but I _do_ know what she is. What she's done." She scowled at him for a beat before adding, "You know, it was one thing, Moody warning me about that, but _you _talked me out of murdering that fucking paedophile rapist _pig_ when I was fifteen, if you recall — somehow I find it hard to believe _you _don't believe I have it in me to kill that murderous bitch."

Yes, he had. Because death was too easy for scum like _that_. He'd also talked her out of murdering a classmate who poisoned one of her friends with a poorly brewed love potion the following year. Mostly by dint of having already taken steps to address the situation, teach the boy the error of his ways. (Dumbledore still considered slipping the boy the Death of Narcissus to be cruel and unusual punishment, but it was both proportional _and _topical. Dumbledore could go hang.)

"No, I don't doubt that. But there _will_ be collateral damage. There always is. And if you're so naïve as to believe this will end with Bellatrix... No matter what Moody has told you, if you do this, if you decide to take the law into your own hands, solve Magical Britain's little _problem_ by any means necessary, there is no going back. Do you trust yourself to decide who else _deserves it_? Do you trust _Moody_? Because the _only _way to do the job you intend to undertake without losing yourself entirely is to avoid the question of whether your decisions, your actions, are necessary — to obey without question or put a single goal above all others, convincing yourself that _anything_ is acceptable, in service to that end. And even then, it only takes the slightest doubt to break you."

"I'm. Not. _You._ Snape," Tonks repeated, her hair going black and spiked with fury.

"I'm not _talking _about _me_." By the time he'd become a spy, he'd long since _been _broken. "I'm talking about _Regulus_."

"Regulus?" There was curiosity in the girl's tone, obviously creeping in despite herself.

"Regulus Black. Bella's cousin. Sirius's younger brother." Severus's friend. One of the few friends he'd ever had. "He was... He was like you. Young. Not..._unaware_, of the realities of war, of _life_, but...innocent, insofar as he hadn't truly _experienced_ them when he made the choice to do what we did."

_Regulus_ had never lost anyone important to him, never killed anyone before he'd taken the Mark, never been betrayed or forced into a situation he was entirely unable to control. He'd been a child, truly. (_Do _not _think about what that makes Miss Tonks, and you for fucking her..._)

"He'd been raised to believe that the Dark Revolution was the way forward. He idolised the Dark Lord, lived for the Cause. He became a spy for the Death Eaters when he was still in school, gathering blackmail material to force other children to spy for us. Making them love him, trust him, before he betrayed them."

It had been Regulus who had recruited Pettigrew, Severus had discovered, in those cherished hours he'd spent renewing his relationship with the miserable Marauder last year. (True to his word, the rat _had _still been fit to stand trial. Willing and eager to do so, even, so long as he never had to see Severus again. Severus was _far _more creative in his tortures than the dementors, if he did say so himself.)

"Never questioned whether what he was doing was right — anything was, in service to the Cause. Until he realised that the Cause itself was flawed and the Dark Lord was a madman. What do you do, when you've compromised your own morals in favor of an ideal — a _lie_ — when you realise you're following a fanatic down a road with no end?"

There was definitely doubt in her eyes, even if she tried to hide it. "What did he do? Regulus, I mean."

"Lost his nerve. Fled a battle, attempted to betray the Dark Lord. Got himself killed for his trouble. Bella made an example of him." Of his body, anyway, using fiendfire to destroy it. But it wouldn't hurt to let Tonks believe she'd been responsible for his death as well — Severus was certain she would have killed him, if Riddle hadn't done it first.

"Yeah, well, it's not really the same thing, is it? I'm just trying to do what's right, Snape. Even if it's not easy."

"As am I, when I tell you that you are making a mistake. Take it from someone who's made a lot of them: this is a bad life choice."

"Maybe. Maybe not. In case you haven't noticed, there is a _little_ bit of a difference between joining the fucking Death Eaters and trying to kill a fucking Dark Lady. But even if I do end up hating myself afterward like you do, it's _my _choice to make."

His eyes narrowed. He could stop her. It wouldn't even be _difficult_ — floo her mother and Andromeda would ensure her hot-headed baby girl didn't run off to do one of the incredibly stupid, madly impulsive, self-destructive things her House was known for. But, well...she was right. It _was_ her choice. He had no business taking it away from her, and she'd never forgive him if he did. They'd spent all of three nights together and, even if she did respect his advice as she had when she was a student, it wasn't as though she had any _obligation _to take his opinions into account.

It wasn't as though he hadn't known how this discussion would end.

Tonks seemed to sense his acceptance of her argument, her eyes flashing at his silent capitulation. "We're leaving in two days, can't for the life of me think now why I thought I should tell you. The Aurors think I've been assigned to deep cover, so I _will _be able to come back when it's done. And when I _do_, you'd better be prepared for an entire night of '_I told you so_'s and make-up sex."

Assuming Bellatrix didn't kill— Wait. _What?_ Maybe he _hadn't _known how this discussion would end. Because he had been fairly certain, even as he'd pressed the argument, that she was going to dismiss his concerns and that would be the end of...this. Whatever _this_ was.

Her face twisted into a familiar sneer. "You didn't think it would be _that_ easy to get rid of me, did you?" she said, before dropping the echo of his features, glaring at him with eyes that reminded him of Poppy Pomfrey. "You're not the only one who can read people, you know. I refuse to let your bloody issues ruin a good thing, so I _will_ be coming back. I'll send you an owl or something."

She disapparated, taking the last word with her. Severus let his head fall to his pillow, trying not to think too hard about the much more likely eventuality of her _not_ coming back — and _not_ because he'd managed to thoroughly alienate her, treating her like the stupid, reckless child she was. It took every ounce of self-control he had in him to _not_ floo her mother, put a stop to this insanity before she could go get herself killed.

Maybe he could get the junior Bellatrix to pass on a message, suggest that it would be more fun to tease and evade the would-be Black Cloaks than to simply kill them. Taggart had suggested that the _senior_ Bellatrix had undergone a potentially personality-altering degree of mental disturbance, and the woman he'd spoken to before her escape had reminded him more of the younger version of herself than the Blackheart he remembered. Lyra would almost _certainly _think it more fun to spend a few months annoying Moody than to outright kill him, and _Nymphadora_ was _family_...

He ignored the voice at the back of his head, telling him to stop deluding himself — if nothing else, they might indulge him simply because it was the thing he would least expect them to do.


	23. Bragging Rights

"Hi, Theo!"

Theo flinched in surprise, blotting the notes he was taking on one of the books he'd borrowed from the very person who'd nearly just caused him to overturn an inkwell on it. He'd been spending most of his time this summer hiding from Cadmus here, in his bedroom (which he had warded himself with the excuse that he was trying out the design he was planning on using on his dorm room at school) with a pile of books from the Black library and no company at all. Which was exactly the way he liked it.

"Lyra. I don't suppose you'd tell me how you got in here, if I were to ask." Because he was pretty sure this _was_ Lyra, not Eris, and she'd somehow managed to get into the Manor without alerting the house wards, _and_ into his room without setting off any of the _extra_ protections he'd been working on all summer.

She laughed, throwing herself onto his bed. "I _did_ tell you I was learning shadow-walking," she told the ceiling.

Er...yes, she _had_, but she certainly hadn't told him she'd _managed_ it. And besides, "You didn't appear in a shadow." She'd just...stepped out of thin air, in the middle of the room, about three feet to his left.

She sat up to give him one of those _I know you're smarter than that_ looks she did so well. "Theo. We're _inside_. Think about it."

He _was_ thinking about it, and he was pretty sure that was complete dragonshite. 'Shadow' wasn't really about the objective presence or absence of light, but the difference between the amount of light in the general area and the relative lack thereof in the shadowed area. It wasn't as though shadow-walkers could go _anywhere_ at night just because the entire side of the planet was covered by its own shadow. And there _were_ shadows in here, but the spot she'd appeared in wasn't one, even if it wasn't in direct sunlight.

"I'm _pretty sure_ it doesn't count as a shadow if it's the brightest part of the room."

She grinned. "Sure it does. Granted, the shadows are...kind of _thinner_, there, so the Dark's harder to reach, but it's still _there_. And getting _out_ is _much_ easier than getting in."

"Er...right..." He couldn't really argue with the fact that she _had_ just appeared there, even if it _did_ go against everything he knew about the Dark Plane. (Well, except that it was easier to get back to the Mundane Plane than to step out of it, that was consistent with what he'd read.) If he tried, he was pretty sure she'd play the _which of us has actually done this _card again. He sighed. Well, at least that meant there wasn't some major, easily-exploited flaw in his wards...or at least not one that anyone other than Lyra and vampires could use. "So...to what do I owe the pleasure?"

"I thought it was about time I bring you in on some things, since you're on the team now."

Theo frowned — was that _supposed_ to make sense? "On the team?"

"Yeah, I mean...you _have_ done your dedication by now, haven't you?"

Oh, so black mages were a _team_ now, were they? He hadn't realised. "I don't see how that's really your business, Black, but no, I haven't."

"But..." Lyra stared at him for a moment, her expression completely absent. "It's been _months_."

He rolled his eyes, the motion as exaggerated and dramatic as possible, just to make sure she didn't miss it. "Yeah, we're not having this conversation again."

Her lips quirked in a childish pout. "Are you doing it on Lammas? That's just a couple days away, you know, Lammas is a good day to do it. If there even is such a thing, I mean, it's not like the Powers give a shite. Still not sure why you're being so bloody...whatever, you know what I mean."

He did. As far as he was concerned, he was the reasonable one. She might be able to take this sort of thing lightly, but they were talking about dedicating the _rest of his life_ in service to a _bloody god_ — he would do it exactly the way he felt was appropriate, when he felt he was ready, and not a second earlier. "I wasn't planning on it. I'm afraid you'll just have to wait."

Letting out her breath in a long, thin sigh, Lyra flopped back onto her back, hard enough she bounced a little on his on bed. "Fine, fine. If you _must_ be a silly normal person, I guess I can wait. Though I hope you're not so bloody slow and wishy-washy with shite for the Conspiracy to Kill Not-Professor Riddle."

"What are you talking about now?"

"The House of Black owes a certain demonic Dark Lord a horrible, painful death, it's this whole thing. You're helping."

She... She didn't mean _the_ Dark Lord, did she? Was she in— No, wait he knew the answer to that. "And...why would I do that?"

"Because I let you borrow my books, it'll be an interesting project, and even if I weren't around you'd probably oppose Riddle just to spite your father. Also, I asked nicely."

She _hadn't_ asked nicely, in point of fact, but she wasn't exactly wrong. Sighing helplessly, he stood up, glaring down at Lyra, where she lay stretched out across his bed, smirking to herself. "You're completely ridiculous, you know that."

She grinned. "You love it."

...He didn't _hate_ it. Even if she could be rather overwhelming at times. "Was that what you were doing on Walpurgis? Something to do with this suicidal quest of yours." He hesitated for a second but, fuck it, laid down next to her. There was plenty of room, and it'd just felt sort of odd looking down at her from halfway across the room. (Also, it was _his _bloody bed.)

"Oh, no. Well, sort of, I guess — I thought it was related at the time, but it turns out I understand _nobody_, not even myself."

...Okay, then? "I don't think anybody understands you, Lyra."

Turning her head to grin at him, the insane girl drawled, "I choose to take that as a compliment."

He would say it hadn't been meant as one, but Theo _was_ planning on dedicating himself to the Infernal Power, so he had absolutely no right to talk.

"Anyway, I _do_ actually know that it worked now. I said something then about not wanting to explain before I knew, I think? But, yeah, I know it worked now, and I guess we can talk about that. There's nobody else I can tell, you know, and it's fucking _neat_ — what's the point in bragging about something if nobody understands what you did? I mean, I told Blaise, but I don't think he really gets how totally _awesome_ it is."

Theo cocked an eyebrow. "I see the muggle slang is contagious. You've been spending too much time with Zabini."

"Yes, well, I do have a muggleborn girlfriend now, so I'm pretty sure I'm a lost cause already."

A _muggleborn girl_... Were Lyra and Granger dating now? Huh. That was going to be hilarious or horrifying to watch, or perhaps both at once. From a safe distance, of course. "What was this thing you wanted to brag about, now?"

"Right, that. Anyway, so you know how... No, wait, let's not start there. Erm..." Lyra frowned up at the ceiling for a moment, chewing on her lip. "You know how using compulsions on a child is Unforgivable?"

Well, there was no way _that_ was a segue into anything pleasant. "Yes."

"Turns out the reason why is, if you do, they turn out like Bellatrix."

"What does..." He trailed off, his unfinished sentence abandoned as he belatedly realised Lyra was talking about _the fucking Blackheart_. "You mean... Are you trying to tell me _Lady Blackheart_ was a victim of childhood mind-molding?"

Lyra _giggled_, which, that didn't seem _at all_ appropriate, given the present topic of conversation. (Not that he honestly expected Lyra bloody Black to ever act appropriately, but still.) "I still think that name is silly. I mean, honestly, Lord Voldemort, Lady Blackheart, the Boy Who Lived, You Know Who — the pseudonyms people throw around in this timeline, it's ridiculous."

_This timeline_...?

"But yeah, that's exactly what I mean. I'm told it explains a lot, apparently, I obviously wasn't around back then. Riddle started throwing compulsions at her on her fifth birthday, and never really stopped. Made her his mind-slave, pretty much." (Theo didn't even _want_ to consider the implications of that.) "That's what we were doing on Walpurgis, Eris and I, restoring Bella's autonomy."

Theo nearly said it was impossible to reverse deep-seated childhood compulsions, reflexively, but the Powers hadn't a reputation for caring what mortals considered impossible — he didn't doubt that, with Eris's assistance, they could have come up with something. He wouldn't think Eris would be particularly suited to..._fixing_ things, but maybe conceptualising it as "restoring Bella's autonomy" made it easier. (High magic was often a matter of perspective more than anything else.) Lyra had already implied she'd been successful, so there was no point questioning whether it was even possible.

Of course, this _also_ suggested the Blackheart wasn't dead — which, he'd sort of assumed that already, she was _the fucking Blackheart_. Honestly, Theo doubted very many people believed the official announcement of her death. They'd said she'd been killed attempting to escape, but _anyone_ who knew _anything_ about _the fucking Blackheart_ knew there was no way they could possibly have managed that, not with the paltry few Aurors they'd stationed at Azkaban. Most everyone he'd heard mention the news — a few Lords and several children with the Allied Dark and Ars Brittania, mostly — had all expressed serious doubts. _Everybody_ feared her, and _nobody_ would believe she was dead until the Ministry presented a corpse. And probably not even then.

She was probably off on the Continent somewhere, that would be the smart thing to do. Even if they managed to capture her, by some inconceivable miracle, Theo could count the magical nations that would even consider extraditing her back to Britain on his fingers — civilised people considered throwing prisoners into a box filled with dementors a crime against humanity.

So, since all that was simple and obvious, Theo went right back to the actually interesting part: "How did you do it?"

"Right, so, to put it in the simplest possible terms, Eris let me possess her and—"

"_What?!"_ Lyra stared at him, blinking in surprise and confusion. Which was completely absurd, that she wouldn't get _why_ he was being, a bit— She'd just said she'd _possessed a god!_ "I'm sorry, I must have misheard you, because I _swore_ you just said you _possessed Lady Eris_."

"Well...yeah? I mean, not all of her, obviously, just a little sliver of her she let me borrow. It's not like I _took_ it, _that_ would be ridiculous."

Theo barely managed to hold in a shocked laugh. There was _no part_ of what she'd just said that _wasn't_ ridiculous!

For a few seconds, questions flew around, none more prominent than another, before he could decide what to ask the realisation started settling over him. _Possessing_ a _sliver_ of a _god_, that just, shouldn't be possible. It _wasn't done_. Unless... Unless the person was _already_ a sliver of a god, unless...

A wave of tingles swept across his skin, his throat clenching, feeling abruptly all too light-headed.

What she'd just said, it would make sense, if she were an avatar.

Lyra was a _bloody avatar of Eris_.

"...I think I need to lie down."

"Er, Theo? You _are_ lying down."

"Oh. Right."

Yeah, he was already lying down. He was lying in his bed.

With Lyra.

A _bloody avatar_ of _fucking Eris_.

Theo honestly thought he might faint.

If he hadn't been determined to continue their association as long and deep as possible, this alone would have been enough to convince him he should. He'd already known she was a black mage, and _brilliant_, but... She was...

He'd never had very many friends — he'd never really felt he needed or wanted any — but one of them was an _Avatar of Chaos_.

(He was never letting her out of his sight again.)

Lyra gave him a peculiar look, somewhere between confused and uncomfortable, but he hardly saw it, he was too busy processing the realisation that Lyra was _apparently_ a fucking _avatar_. Before long, she apparently brushed off his little moment, started rattling off about...something about...feeding the Blackheart's memories through her...or viewing them simultaneously? Some trick to rebuild her mind without letting the compulsions reform, he got that. And that was _fascinating_, yes, but it wasn't...

He meant, from what he understood, they'd exploited the connection both of them had with Eris. He'd hardly blinked at the revelation that the Blackheart was _also_ a black mage dedicated to Eris — she did clearly lean _far_ more into Destruction than Lyra did, but it wasn't a surprise. But anyway, this little trick they'd pulled off, it _sounded_ like it should only work between a dedicate and an avatar of a single Aspect. So, it was interesting, but it wasn't really something that could be applied to _anything_ else.

Though, it was possible a similar technique to break childhood compulsions could be designed using solely mind magic. Hmm...

That was an interesting thought, actually. He'd have to talk to Blaise about it.

"So...it _worked_, is what you're saying." Yes, Theo, focus on the fascinating magic, what could very well be an entirely _unique_ phenomenon that would never be replicated ever, not on the fact that _Lyra_ was apparently an _avatar_, that, don't think about that.

...Or about the fact that the Blackheart was free and sane for, it seemed, the first time in her entire life.

Son of a bitch.

Lyra let out a thin sigh, glaring up at the ceiling. "_Yes_, it worked. I hardly remember any of it, though — I think Eris was worried I'd end up too much like her, wiped my memory of most of the night."

"Well, that _does_ make sense." Experiencing all her memories would essentially make Lyra a copy of the Blackheart in a younger body, and Theo would go out on a limb and assume _Eris_, of all possible Aspects, would prefer her dedicates not be all exactly the same. It seemed a reasonable guess that a goddess of Chaos would find that boring. (Not to mention, presumably the Powers would be more attached to and protective of their avatars, and Lyra _was an avatar_, apparently — he was trying to stay calm, but it was _fucking difficult_.)

"Yeah, but Bella's life was just _fascinating_, and she knows all kinds of interesting magic, you don't understand, Theo. I still have a few flashes here and there, but nothing really substantial." Lyra's petulant glaring — directed at her Patron, he guessed — shifted into an irritated grimace. "I _do _know she still kind of likes Riddle, which is just— She's not his mind-slave anymore, but Eris says she's not convinced he actually did anything wrong, and we have _no idea_ if she's taking the piss — she's _much_ better at mind magic than I am — annoying, obnoxious, ungrateful cunt. I'm still going to kill him anyway, though. If she has a problem with it, she can go fuck herself."

That was almost funny, honestly, but Theo somehow doubted Lyra would much appreciate him showing it. She was obviously taking the Blackheart's disinterest in Eris's vengeance against the Dark Lord on her behalf personally. (Which, well, Theo thought one of the Powers going out of their way to liberate someone from mind-molding and destroy the person responsible deserved a little fucking appreciation, but this _was_ the Blackheart they were talking about.) But anyway, "So, is she actually _opposed_ to our...Conspiracy to Kill Not-Professor Riddle — was that how you put it?"

(He had no idea why she was calling the Dark Lord _Not-Professor Riddle_, but he also didn't particularly care, on a scale of...everything she'd said over the course of this conversation _already_.)

Lyra grinned, clearly amused with him borrowing the phrase. "I knew I liked you for some reason."

"I'm flattered, really."

One of those incongruously girlish giggles of hers, those always struck him as odd. "But no...maybe? I don't know. I wouldn't if I was her, but as this little exercise has made abundantly clear, I'm not. Last I heard, she was meeting up with Greyback's people on the Continent. I'm not actually sure what she's doing, like, if she has a plan. Apparently they're _friends_. But as far as I know they haven't really been _doing_ anything — Greyback, I mean. For a terrifying werewolf revolutionary, he's surprisingly boring."

Well, yes, the propaganda surrounding Greyback did exaggerate his atrocities rather a lot. As philosophically opposed as the two sides of the war had been, most of them _were_ still upstanding, pureblooded sons and daughters of British Noble Houses — werewolves, on the other hand, one could say pretty much whatever one wanted about werewolves without anyone objecting. Some of the stories flying around about Greyback and his people, even now, a decade and a half after he'd left Britain, shite about blood magic and cannibalism and paedophilia, whatever awful crime the teller could imagine, on and on and on...

Which wasn't to say the Dark Lord's werewolf allies hadn't done anything morally questionable at all, of _course_ they had. They were simply _also_ a convenient target to pin every horror story imaginable on, socially-neutral propaganda to motivate people to oppose the Death Eaters. As much as Dumbledore might be inclined toward benevolence in this particular case, most of the Light _strongly_ disagreed — shite, as he understood it, the faction in the Wizengamot most supportive of greater rights for werewolves was Ars Publica, the _traditional Dark_. (Which, despite the Death Eater propaganda he'd grown up with, was obvious when he thought about it; after all, the Dark wasn't likely to start using "dark creature" as a pejorative, were they, that just didn't make any sense.) As far as the Noble Houses were considered, the werewolves were an acceptable target, demonising them far more politically safe than their peers — after all, they would likely be forced to work with each other again once the fighting was over, it wouldn't do to say anything _too_ extreme.

(He really did hate the nobility sometimes.)

"Let's see, what else has been going on lately... Oh! You know about the Tournament this year, right?"

"Yes, obviously." It still hadn't been officially announced, but Theo hadn't spoken to anyone who _hadn't_ known about it already for months — the Ministry was constitutionally incapable of keeping secrets, this was expected.

"Well, I was going over Zee's — I mean, the Zabinis' — wards back in the spring. I redid the whole thing for them because, really, Zee is _not_ a wardcrafter — she didn't do a bad job for an amateur, I guess, but honestly it was a sloppy mess. If I'd written that script, Ciardha would have scrapped it and made me start over."

...Ciardha? Was that supposed to be her 'travelling cursebreaker' guardian? He'd been under the impression that story was a lie too... "I'm sure you'll be getting to the point eventually."

"I'm getting there, Jesus." (Was she _trying_ to sound like a muggleborn?) "Anyway, going over the wards, and I found her papers on the Tournament, and it turns out their panel of judges was _all_ wrong. Just the three Headmasters, and Crouch and Bagman from the Ministry. Three out of five from the British government — in what universe could _that_ ever be considered a _neutral_ panel?"

"I wouldn't be surprised if the organisers were stacking it on purpose." That sort of thing _did_ used to happen with the original Tournament, though the other schools were usually pretty good at catching it. "Who did you invite, then?"

Lyra pouted at him. "Am I really that predictable?"

"It was obvious from context, Lyra."

"Right, well. I expanded it to seven, because obviously. Anyway, I kept the three Headmasters — I looked into it, and apparently the Headmasters are almost always on the panel of judges, and each school gets one, so. I sent a letter to the I.C.W., inviting them to send a representative. I heard they picked some bloke named Régis Delacour — diplomat, never heard of him before."

Theo hadn't either, but, "Delacour, like _veela_ Delacour?"

Lyra shrugged. "I guess? I think the I.C.W. would know not to send a veela to Britain, what with all the racist idiots around, he probably just married in or something."

Because a 'blood traitor' was _so_ much better than a 'magical creature'. The I.C.W. was clearly fucking with _somebody_, Theo just didn't know whether it was this Delacour chap or the entire bloody country.

"I sent an invite to Cassie Lovegood, apparently she's already dropped out of an open in...Sri Lanka? Is that what it's called now? Whatever, she's in the country, apparently, I'm sure she'll show up."

There was something inherently funny about Lyra, an _avatar of Chaos_, inviting Cassie bloody Lovegood back to the country. And looking positively _giddy_ about it, even...

For a moment, he considered commenting — they _were_ both black mages (or, she was and he would be soon, anyway), inviting a famous light warrior with a long record of hunting down and murdering people like them seemed, just, _completely_ reckless, even on a scale of Lyra Black. But, when he thought about it, it was..._probably_ fine. Lovegood was known to be selective in her targets, had openly associated with ritualists and (suspected) white _and_ black mages around the world. So long as they didn't do anything extreme — and avoided doing anything _too_ awful to their classmates, victimisers of children were usually the targets of Lovegood's bloodiest hits — they should be safe.

Really, Theo wasn't likely to draw her attention at all, and Lyra was pretty good about picking socially-acceptable targets. They'd be fine. Probably. He hoped.

In any case, Lyra was already moving on. "And I haven't heard about Perenelle Flamel yet, but—"

"Wait, aren't the Flamels dead?"

Lyra shrugged. "Officially, yes, but I'm sure she'll show up anyway."

... He had absolutely no idea how he was supposed to respond to that.

"And the last one..." Her face splitting into a bright grin, she chirped, "You'll _never_ guess who the last one is."

As though he would have guessed any of the last three. "No, I won't. I guess you'll just have to tell me."

"Oh, poo, you're no fun. I sent a letter, much like the one to the I.C.W., asking them to choose a representative, to a certain...educational institution in the Americas."

It was _obvious_ what she was talking about. It took Theo some moments to find his voice again, staring blankly back at Lyra — she looked _ever_ so pleased with herself, the bloody madwoman. "You invited..._Miskatonic_ to join the judges' panel."

"Yep!" Popping the bloody _P_ again, like an overexcited child...

"Are you _insane_?!"

"That's what they tell me. But anyway, have you heard of Angel Black?"

"...You mean, Angélos Black, _Avatar of the Dark_, Angel Black? Wait, Misaktonic is sending _Angélos Black_ to judge the Tournament?!"

And Lyra kept grinning, as though she had absolutely no comprehension of how absolutely absurd this was. "Yep! She's great, makes the air around her all tingly. She dropped in on us in California to confirm the invitation was legitimate — Zee was _very_ annoyed with me afterward, it was funny."

Gods and Powers, this Tournament was going to be a fucking disaster. Having _one_ Black avatar kicking around the school was plenty — there was absolutely no way having _two_ was going to end well for anyone. From some of the stories he'd heard about the Avatar of the Dark, she was _far_ less...civilized, than Lyra. They were probably equally likely to make a horrible mess of the revival of the Tournament, but _Angélos fucking Black_ was almost certain to make it much, much worse. After all, unlike Lyra, her messes tended to have a body count.

Though, the thought of Dumbledore realising exactly who he was sitting next to was bloody hilarious, it was almost worth it just to see the look on his face.

Wait a second. "Let me get this straight: you invited Cassie Lovegood _and_ Angélos Black to the same event."

The grin on Lyra's face didn't even twitch. "Do you think they'll sit them next to each other?"

... No, there was absolutely no way this was going to end well. None at all.

"Let's see, what else is going on... Nothing that interesting, I guess? I'm still working with Sam, Zee's muggle Ravenclaw, but that's a long-term project, don't really have much to talk about there. Oh, I am working on a theory unifying magic and muggle physics, but I'm still putting it together, I'll get back to you when it's closer to done."

It was amazing just how casually she could say that. _Oh, I'm working on revolutionising both magic __**and**_ _science, no big deal, just this thing I'm doing in my spare time_. He thought he would have gotten used to Lyra being Lyra by this point, but he wasn't certain he ever would — the head-spinning rush of mad Lyra-ness never seemed to stop, or even slow down.

(It sounded like he was complaining, but he honestly thought he might love her a little bit. Which did make sense, her being a _bloody avatar_, and all — he _loved_ Magic, always had.)

"There's the stuff with Sirius and Harry and Dumbledore, but I'm sure you know all of that..."

"About that, what happened with the vote to expel Dumbledore?" He hadn't been present at the vote itself, of course, and his father hadn't spoken of it, but he'd been certain Dumbledore was finished. In the days since, Theo had gotten his hands on a record of the vote, and it was...baffling, to put it mildly. Now, he'd admit he didn't pay as much attention to Wizengamot politics as an heir of a Noble House probably should, but there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to who had voted which way, fault lines split through factions and alliances that made absolutely no sense.

"Well, he _would_ have lost, that's sort of the problem."

"What?"

"Apparently, the vote wasn't going the way Cissy expected — prominent people in Ars Brittania and Dumbledore's Light started voting up, so the Dark panicked, ran all over the floor to get their own people to flip and sabotage the vote. I'm told Cissy and Ingham are scrambling trying to find out what the fuck is going on, but neither of them exactly have many friends in the Light, so it's not going well."

That even the leadership in the Wizengamot had no idea what was going on wasn't exactly reassuring. "Maybe he's just fallen so far even the Light is done with him." It was hard to imagine the so-called Light Houses, at least, turning on their hero. Dumbledore did have somewhat more liberal views on being rights than they preferred, and had a mildly populist bent in economics and family law few among the nobility in general were comfortable with — pretty much just Common Fate, honestly, half of them were considered a step away from class traitors by the rest of the nobility — but they _had_ practically deified him in the decades after Grindelwald. His disagreements with Ars Brittania were more serious, but they'd always supported him as well, it certainly wasn't in their interests to expel probably the most unapologetically Light Chief Warlock they'd ever had. But, well, Dumbledore had been buried in scandal lately. It wasn't out of the question their betrayal of their figurehead was entirely personal, political considerations aside.

Lyra shot him a doubtful look. "I don't know about that — you might have noticed, the Light is _completely_ irrational about Dumbledore. Cissy thinks their willingness to vote him out suggests they don't need him anymore. The worst case scenario, they think they can control the vote for the next Chief Warlock. But that doesn't seem possible — with the Allied Dark, Ars Publica, and Common Fate all together, Cissy is positive they have enough of a margin to ram through whoever they like, as long as they're not too controversial — so Ingham and Longbottom are thinking the alliance isn't as solid as it seems. Longbottom says there must be traitors in the Allied Dark, Cissy says the same thing about Common Fate, and Ingham thinks they're _both_ planning to stab her in the back, it's a mess."

Theo opened his mouth to say something sarcastic about how very good everyone involved was at their jobs...and froze. "Fuck."

"What?"

"Er... You know my father challenged Lady Malfoy for leadership of the Allied Dark a few weeks ago?"

"Yeah, she told me about that. Didn't she win though? With just how smug she was telling me about it, I assumed she'd completely flattened him."

Theo nodded — she had, obviously. Cadmus wasn't a slouch in a fight, but the Blackheart had ensured her favourite baby sister could protect herself, he was _entirely_ out of his league. "Has it ever occurred to you that who's the better duellist is really a _terrible_ way to select a faction's leadership?"

Looking rather bemused, Lyra said, "Well, _obviously_. That is stupid, but, I guess I assumed it was carried over from when the Allied Dark were still the Death Eaters. I didn't really think about it that much, just that it meant Cissy had her people well in line..."

"Wait, really? I thought..." He'd _thought_ Lyra would be on board with that sort of thing. It was no secret that the Blackheart had had a significant influence on the culture of the Death Eaters, he'd assumed this was...well, a _Black_ thing.

She shrugged. "Honestly, the way the Circle of Agastya does things seems the most reasonable to me. But I'm not the one running things, so, just been going along with it."

That...made a _lot_ of sense, when he thought about it. The Circle of Agastya represented a...sort of quasi-anarchist strain of thought among the Dark — they were most well-known for the "Circles" themselves, groups of dark mages cooperating to achieve one goal or another (usually, murdering a local Dark Lord), but their general philosophy had slowly seeped through certain segments of the Dark around the world. Ars Publica had been becoming increasingly Agastyan over the last generations, though they didn't use the word.

The Circles themselves, traditionally, were brought together in free association, with no real internal hierarchy. It usually required a mage (or several) with enough influence to "call" a Circle in the first place, and their members most suited to strategy would often slide into an organising/command role, but they didn't really have leaders in the sense most people would think of the term. They didn't believe in systems of coercion, where one person could give an order and another was obligated to follow it, considered such things to be inherently immoral.

They were, to oversimplify things, the Chaotic side of international Dark culture. It wasn't at all a surprise that Lyra would appreciate their way of doing things.

"I'm guessing Cissy beating the shite out of him didn't actually get Cadmus to give up."

"Ah, no, er..." Theo winced, glancing away to stare sightlessly at the opposite wall. "He's been dragging me along to political meetings, you know. I don't sit in on them, of course, relegated to side rooms with the other children, but... The Parkinsons are usually there. I've seen Rowle, Wilkes, Yaxley." He took a breath. "Young and Carpenter. And...Llewellyn is always there. And usually Brown and Diggory."

He wasn't looking, but Theo could almost _feel_ her level stare, the magic around her turned unpleasantly sharp. "Those are Light families. And, isn't Lord Llewellyn the leader of Ars Brittania at the moment?"

The surprise on Lyra's voice was _completely_ justified. Ars Brittania was sort of like the Allied Dark of the Light — extreme and intolerant, the most radical restrained from open violence by a hair. The two factions had similar ideas about nonhumans and muggleborns, but otherwise the Allied Dark and Ars Brittania had virtually nothing in common. "Yes, he is."

"They... Huh." She was quiet a short moment, the cold tension slowly fading out of the air. "That _does_ make sense, I guess. I mean, the Parkinsons, Rowles, and Yaxleys were with Ars Brittania in my old universe. The Notts too, actually, now that I think about it."

Theo was saved from coming up with how to respond to the suggestion that families that had been Dark for generations could have _anything_ to do with _Ars Brittania_ by what Lyra said immediately afterward. "_Your old universe?_"

"If we assume everyone who was with Ars Brittania back there will flip here, that means... Hang on." Lyra sat up, reaching into the empty space around herself — shadow pockets? how the _fuck_... — to pull out some papers, a muggle pen. Propping himself up on his elbows, he could see she had split the page in half, filling out a row of tally marks on either side, then listing the names of Noble Houses under those, muttering under her breath.

Which, he realised this politics stuff might be important to other people, but Theo _really_ didn't care who the Chief Warlock was. Especially when Lyra went saying things like, "Your old universe? _Lyra?!_"

"Did I not mention that?" Lyra shot him an exasperated look over her shoulder, before turning back to her whatever that was. Projecting a vote based on the assumption that half of the Allied Dark would leave their new alliance with Ars Publica to join with Ars Brittania instead, which was...just _absurd_. Thankfully, he didn't have to ask again — she sounded distracted, but she did actually answer. "That's why no one can figure out where I came from, I didn't exist here before last Lammas. I'm the Bellatrix Black of a different universe. I _meant_ to go back thirty years, to make Grindelwald's revolution actually happen — he wasn't released from prison in Twenty-Eight, it didn't get off the ground without him — but Eris fucked it up on purpose somehow, and I ended up going thirty years in the future instead. In a universe where Grindelwald's revolution _did_ succeed...sort of...so I guess that's something."

She said that whole _absurd_ thing without the slightest hint of self-consciousness, as though she didn't realise just how completely insane it was. Not to mention, "Lyra, you can't travel _forward_ in time. That's, just, impossible."

She shrugged. "Sure you can. You just can't aim very well — it's hard to hit a target that doesn't exist yet, you know. Besides, once the Powers get involved 'impossible' doesn't really mean anything. Though I understand we owe Mystery one, whole reason Eris and I decided to expedite your dedication, which you should _really_ get on with, by the way."

"...You're being completely serious. You're not just fucking with me?"

Slowly, Lyra's eyes were drawn away from her papers, fixing Theo with a doubtful frown. "Er...no? Why would I make that up?"

"I don't..." Well, he couldn't think of a reason, really. She'd gone through multiple cover stories to explain her existence and her sudden presence in Britain, and while some of them had been...problematic, if thought about too hard, she couldn't exactly go around telling people she was a _time-travelling black mage_.

"I really thought we talked about this already, when we talked about our dedications..." Lyra trailed off, blinking. Then she shrugged, turning back to her papers. "Oh well, not important."

Oh, yes, he could see that, why should anyone think it was worth discussing the fact that Lyra was an _alternate Blackheart_ from _a different universe_? Clearly, there was just something wrong with him! "How did you... What was it like, crossing over?"

"Nauseating, mostly." Lyra hissed, growled what was probably a curse of some kind — it wasn't in English. "It's going to be tight, we are _so_ fucked. I need to go talk to Cissy." The papers disappeared again, Lyra bounced up to her feet, the bed hardly jolting in her wake.

"What? No, Lyra, you can't just run off after springing something like that on me! We have to talk about this!"

Lyra rolled her eyes — _rolled her eyes_, this crazy girl, honestly... "You need to work on your priorities, Nott. When fall comes around, I'll still be me. Preserving our brand new majority in the Wizengamot long enough to actually _do_ something with it is a far more pressing matter."

"Lyra, don't you—"

"See you later, Theo, get on with that dedication thing while I'm gone." And then, before Theo could get another syllable in, Lyra was gone, disappearing without a sound or a flicker from the middle of his bedroom — slipping away into shadows despite the fact that _there were no shadows there_, the lights were on, how the _fuck_ was she doing that...

Theo wanted to say he was angry at her. Honestly, dropping things like that on his head and popping off without even explaining a single bloody thing, it was _very_ frustrating. He _hated_ not getting proper explanations for things. Especially fascinating magic things. But...

She was a bloody _avatar_, who'd come here from an _alternate universe_, thirty years _in the past_. And she apparently wasn't going anywhere, involving herself in the political life of the here and now as she was.

He'd get his questions in eventually. Especially since she expected him to help her kill the Dark Lord — she'd have no choice but to sit down and actually _fucking explain herself_ for once _eventually_. In fact, no matter how tedious and _frustrating_ the bloody girl could be, Theo could feel a smile pulling at his lips anyway.

His life had quite abruptly grown _far_ more interesting than he'd had any reason to expect.

* * *

_Oh Theo, silly magic nerd_ xD

_Anyway, we're starting to come in on the end here. Looking at...seven more summer scenes — four of them are finished, and two are partially done, so should get out consistently._

_Just before posting the last one, I'm planning on rearranging the summer scenes into chronological order. Not going to be changing anything, so you don't have to go rereading it. We were just writing these as we felt like it, so we weren't getting them written in anything like the order they actually happened in, so, kind of mess. You'll just get a notice for the last post, and everything well be rearranged, shouldn't even notice it happening. The reviews will end up attached to the wrong chapters, and it will probably be confusing for anyone partway through when it hits, but, eh._

_After that, we may or may not take a couple weeks to get some momentum going, and then it'll be straight into year four. Woo._

_—Lysandra_


	24. LA Nightlife

Harry was practicing legilimency with Blaise, Lyra curled up in an armchair reading some runes book or other (_not talking_, because Blaise had bet that she couldn't _not talk_ for a whole hour), when Sirius bounded into the main room of their flat. Mira was off somewhere doing business things, he thought. She had been working a lot, kept popping back over to Britain with Lyra's portal, too, doing things with the Department of Education — apparently there were going to be a few changes at Hogwarts next year. (He hadn't wanted to ask.) He had, in fact, just thought that the whole afternoon was unusually quiet.

That thought lasted until Sirius yanked the door open so hard Harry was pretty sure the handle left a dent in the wall behind it and _pounced_ onto the sofa, grinning like a maniac. There was really no other word for it. Blaise barely got his feet out of the way in time.

"What are you all _doing_ in here, just sitting around, being boring? You're too young to be so square! You're my godson, we should do something! Like...go to the beach! Have you ever swum in the Pacific? I haven't, which is just stupid, it's been just sitting there my entire life, and only a few miles away all summer. Ooh! Or we could go to Chinatown! _Eggrolls_, Harry! Or, I don't know, what do you even like to _do_? You have to do _something _for fun. How have we never talked about that? Flying? I know you play Quidditch, but have you ever seen stunt flying before? I'm _sure_ there's an exhibition ring around here _somewhere_. Not sure about show times, but even if they're just practicing, it's outta sight, dude! Or, you said something about practicing dueling, right? I _know_ there's a dueling club out by that wilderness reserve. What was it called again? Tep... Top... Fuck it, something with a '_T_', anyway."

Harry had no words. Just...what the fuck? Blaise was, of course, taking this in stride, as he did everything, soft amusement radiating off of him. "I see someone's feeling a bit _mad_ today," he murmured.

Harry was pretty sure Sirius didn't hear him, still babbling on about playing tourists and how he used to go exploring muggle London as a kid and cities were _great_, they should see more of it than just this flat. Not that it wasn't a _nice_ flat, but— An orange spellglow hit him from behind, Harry hadn't heard the incantation over Sirius. He yelped, popping back to his dog form and jumping over to Lyra's chair, growling and snapping in her face in a way that made Harry want to be at the top of the nearest tree. Yes, she _had _just hexed him in the back, but... He just didn't really like dogs, okay, especially angry ones.

Lyra did not share his entirely reasonable discomfort with animals that could bite her face off growling two inches from her nose. "Ugh, dog breath!" She shoved him onto the floor, whereupon he turned back into a very angry wizard.

"What the fuck was that for, Trixie?"

She raised an eyebrow at him, but didn't tell him off for calling her Trixie. (Which supposedly only Mira was allowed to do, because...well, Harry's pet theory was that Lyra fancied Mira, but he didn't dare ask her for confirmation, because she'd probably straight-up admit it, and _knowing _that would be even weirder than just _suspecting_ it.) She had apparently given up entirely on trying to make him call her Lyra. She had admitted, when he'd confronted her about it at the beginning of summer, that yes, Bellatrix Lestrange was her mother, or more accurately, her much older identical twin — and no, that didn't bother her, why would it, Bella was a fucking impressive witch, even if she was the _evil _twin. Bellatrix was her middle name, even, because of how the Blacks named their kids, so it wasn't like Sirius was even entirely _wrong_ to call her Bella (or Trixie). She just preferred not to draw attention to the resemblance between herself and her...evil twin.

Of course, Harry was pretty sure that Sirius had started out calling her Bella in the first place because he'd legitimately confused the two of them. In typical Sirius fashion, rather than try to pretend that whole post-Azkaban paranoia and confusion thing hadn't happened, he had decided to play into it, teasing her about the resemblance pretty much constantly, even though he _had_ to know by now that they weren't really the same person.

Harry was pretty sure she didn't actually mind, now that everyone knew about the relationship between herself and Bellatrix. (And yes, it _did_ bother him that he'd been the _last_ to find out — granted, no one had actually confirmed it for Sirius, but he totally knew.) In fact, he kind of suspected she was going out of her way to encourage him, because (for some reason that only made sense to her) she thought it was funny being compared to an insane murderer like Lestrange.

Blaise checked the time. "Thirty-seven minutes."

Lyra ignored him. "Just encouraging you to focus, Siri, darling." Her tone and the smirk that accompanied her words made Harry think she was quoting someone, a private joke of some kind.

Sure enough, "Are you _sure_ you're not Bellatrix?" Sirius asked, every inch of his body language projecting overly-obvious suspicion. "Because that sounds _exactly _like something my _mother _used to say all the time."

"I heard it from Cissy."

"A likely story..."

"Oh, for fuck's sake!" Lyra snapped, trying to sound outraged, but not quite managing it, as she couldn't quite seem to get the smirk off her face. She slid her left sleeve up, baring her forearm. "There are _some _distinguishing features between the two of us, you know."

"Pretty sure she could hide the Mark if she wanted to."

"Pretty sure she wouldn't bother."

"Unless she was trying to convince me that she wasn't herself."

There was really nowhere to go once the teasing reached that point — Sirius could claim _anything _Lyra did (or didn't do) as evidence that she was really Lestrange trying to convince him that she wasn't. "Are you trying to annoy me enough that I'll practice dueling with you?"

"_No_, of course not!" Sirius said, very emphatically. Then he grinned. "Is it working?"

"Kind of, yeah." Lyra closed her book with a sharp snap, though she clearly wasn't actually annoyed. "Though I _know_ kicking your rusty old arse isn't going to do a bloody thing to convince you I'm not her."

"HA!" Sirius nearly shouted, a delighted bark of laughter. "Not today, Trixie! Today's one of those days where everything goes _my_ way."

Lyra snorted. "Yeah, we'll see about that. Third blood and nothing you can't heal?"

"And no Unforgivables."

"Oh, right, public gym. But how am I supposed to be Bellatrix if I'm not allowed to use the Cruciatus?"

"You're definitely still Bellatrix even if— Wait, can you actually _cast _it? Aren't you like, _twelve_?"

She flipped him off. "Did you want a demonstration?" she offered, grinning, a teasing lilt to her tone.

Sirius shuddered. "_No_. Do you know how much that thing _hurts_?"

"Of course I do," she drawled, disturbingly matter-of-fact about it. Harry was _far_ more bothered by her being kidnapped and tortured at the end of the year than she was, which, well, there was obviously something wrong with that girl. He still wasn't entirely convinced she was human — even if she was Lestrange's clone, clearly that just meant Lestrange wasn't human either. "But _after_ is even better when you're a little mad. Like, better enough that it's borderline worth it."

Okay, that was just— _Is she being serious about that? _he thought at Blaise, because he honestly couldn't tell.

Dark amusement accompanied his response. _I _did _tell you she likes to play rough. _

_I think you're fucking with me. Didn't you tell me that curse can literally melt someone's brain?_

_Yeah, but that takes a while, and no, I'm not. Sirius thinks she's exaggerating a little, just to fuck with him. I'm getting the impression that she's not wrong about the afterglow being better during a manic episode, but it's still definitely not worth it._

Harry tried not to get all uncomfortable about Blaise using legilimency so casually. He could probably have reached out and confirmed that just as easily — mind magic had gotten kind of scarily easy since he'd started having those weird Voldemort dream-vision things, which Snape had confirmed meant he was actually coming into the talent, now — but... It bothered him a little, how easy it was to just get in someone's head. Made him feel kind of...dirty, compromising people's privacy like that. Even when he used legilimency to talk to Blaise, like he just had, he tried not to pick up anything other than their conversation.

_Yeah, well, it's not like I can do anything without him noticing, he could stop me if he wanted, just doesn't care. Thinks it's funny, the three of us having a conversation Lyra isn't privy to._

"A, that was _such_ a Bellatrix thing to say, and B, there _are _spells to make you come without having to do the whole every-nerve-on-fire thing first, you know."

Lyra's teasing smirk fell away in obvious incomprehension. "Wait, what?"

"_What_, what? I find it hard to believe that Zee hasn't at least _mentioned_ that sort of kinky shite at one point or another."

Harry, who actually _was_ following the conversation — and somehow wasn't even surprised there were spells like that — flushed at the idea of Mirabella teaching them to Lyra. Or anyone. He knew they all considered it weirdly prudish and muggle of him to be so uncomfortable talking about sex, but he didn't care, there were some things he just didn't want to think about, including mums having sex.

Blaise sniggered. _You know Mira doesn't care if you think about her—_ Harry shoved him out of his head. (_Blaise_, unlike Harry, had no concept of personal space when it came to legilimency, and had a habit of eavesdropping on Harry whenever Harry didn't actively stop him. In hindsight, he thought he should have expected that, the way Blaise just _physically _sprawled all over everyone all the time, too.)

"Mira thinks sex is better when there's actual skill involved. Orgasm-inducing charms are cheating." (The fact that Mira and Blaise clearly talked about sex fairly regularly was one of the weirdest, most uncomfortable things about their relationship.) "And I'd prefer to practice dancing over dueling, if anyone cares."

Both Lyra and Sirius turned to look at him, their expressions as they considered the _not_ running-off-to-beat-the-shite-out-of-each-other option _eerily _similar — slightly surprised and maybe a little annoyed. Then Lyra shrugged. "Fine with me. Want to learn how to salsa, Siri?"

"I already know how to salsa, Ellie Adams taught me back in...what summer did we... _Ooh_! I know what we should do! Dancing! Muggle dancing!"

"Muggles salsa," Blaise interjected.

"No, I mean, not— Have you ever been to a disco? Any of you?"

"I hate to break it to you, Sirius, but nobody discos anymore unless they're doing it ironically."

"We should go! We _have _to go! It'll be great!"

"We're a little young to get through the door, in case you hadn't noticed." Blaise, as generally happened when _Lyra_ got like this, seemed to be playing the voice of reason. Not that he would actually try to stop them if he couldn't talk them out of it.

Sirius was briefly stymied, but Lyra grinned. "Aging potions are a thing, Blaise."

"Also, it's three in the afternoon, pretty sure nightclubs are only open _at night_."

_Hey, I got them to not go beat the shite out of each other somewhere, didn't I?_

Harry shoved Blaise out of his head again. And then immediately re-established the connection, because Sirius said, "So we have time to figure out where we're going, have dinner, maybe see if we can score some Dragonsbreath — ooh! or Wyrm! I would love to see Bellatrix on Wyrm, that would be fucking hilarious!"

So Harry had to ask, _Do I even want to know what those are?_

_Dragonsbreath is an hallucinogen, usually you smoke it. Wyrm is a controlled potion that mimics the experience of an empath. Usually the recreational version is tweaked so you only pick up the positive emotions. Yes, they're both illegal, no, they're not really that dangerous — I'm pretty sure there was Dragonsbreath at the Hufflepuffs' post-exams party._

Harry squirmed. He wasn't entirely sure he was comfortable with the idea of Sirius or Lyra — neither of whom were the most stable at the best of times — running off to do the magical equivalent of some kind of party drugs. Not that he really knew much of anything _about _drugs, he just... The idea of making it so you couldn't trust your own senses, or so you couldn't think straight, or didn't really have control of yourself, _on purpose_, was just..._why?_

"I'm pretty sure that Wyrm and aging potions don't mix well." (Because of _course_ Lyra would know that off the top of her head — unless it was just an excuse not to take it.) "What does one wear to a nightclub?"

"Uh..." Sirius pulled his wand, started conjuring illusions of a handful of girls — they had to be people he actually knew back in the Seventies, because Harry was _positive_ that was his _mother_, wearing some kind of weird scrunchy blouse that left her shoulders _and _waist bare, and a skirt that covered less than Mirabella's obscenely tiny housecoat. (That was just bloody _uncomfortable_.) "Things like this. Or, well, they _did_. I guess we should probably look into that. To the shops!"

"Yeah, alright, just let me grab some shoes. You have muggle money?"

Sirius patted down the pockets of his robes, frowned, and left the room, presumably in search of his wallet, effortlessly dodging the flying sandals Lyra had summoned from the entryway on his way out the door.

"Put on muggle clothes while you're at it!" she shouted after him. She was already wearing muggle clothes — what she considered to be a scandalously revealing vest and the same sort of shorts the muggle girls wore around here. Which wouldn't actually scandalise anyone other than like, Malfoy's mum, but she had a point, he didn't think he'd ever seen any of the purebloods at school with their shoulders uncovered. _Or_ their knees. He'd just never noticed until she pointed it out.

"I thought you hated shopping," Harry said, completely unenthused with the idea of following Lyra and a disturbingly Lyra-ish Sirius around a muggle shopping centre for God knew how long.

"I do, but I've never been to a muggle tailor, and I don't like shopping because it's boring and tedious and people are generally annoying. But in case you haven't noticed, Siri's a bit mad today, so I'm pretty sure it's not going to be boring and tedious, and having company to mock stupid people generally makes them less annoying. Besides, I _never_ get to see the Black Madness from _this_ side. This is _great_."

"Uh _huh_." _Is the Black Madness contagious?_

_Technically? No, I don't think so..._

_But..._ Because Harry was pretty sure there was a _but _at the end of that thought.

"Yeah, give it a few hours," Blaise said. "It starts to wear on you, trying to keep up."

"Maybe for _you_—"

Blaise sent a wave of resigned exasperation at him. _Yeah, I thought she might say something like that. _But _Lyra's always a _little _mad. Sure, she generally has enough self-control to not act like it, but have you ever seen her just sit around _not doing anything _for more than ten seconds or so? It's not out of the question that she'll decide that if Sirius doesn't have to act like a normal person, she doesn't either. _

_We're so fucked._

"—but you don't have to come, I assume you already have something for you and Harry to wear. We'll come back and get you when it starts getting dark. You _do_ want to come to the dancing part, don't you?"

_Probably. _Blaise grinned. "Wouldn't miss it."

Harry didn't actually think he _did _want to go, but he definitely didn't want to get left behind while everyone else went out partying, either. He nodded, somewhat reluctantly, just as Sirius reappeared in the doorway in jeans and a faded Rolling Stones t-shirt that he might have actually bought in the Seventies.

"Aren't you _ready_ yet?"

"You were the one who was holding us up," Lyra said, skipping across the room to link her arm through Sirius's, looking for all the world like his teenage daughter, dragging him off to the mall.

Of course, that image was ruined almost immediately, as Harry was pretty sure he heard Sirius suggest that they try to find a muggle drug dealer and buy some ecstasy just before the door to the flat slammed behind them.

Blaise started giggling almost immediately.

"What the hell is so funny?"

"Nothing, just. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to get themselves arrested at some point tonight, but at least it will keep them entertained."

Harry groaned. "I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to get _us_ arrested before the end of the night. And then spend a couple of hours laughing at us before breaking us out, or something."

Blaise just laughed harder.

* * *

Well, they hadn't managed to get anyone arrested, yet, though Harry wasn't _entirely _sure how. Lyra had tried to explain at one point that luck and magic and the whole damn universe were on their side on a night like this, but Lyra was also _noticeably_...not sober. (Granted, not _very _noticeably, just...kind of _softer_, and she didn't make as much sense as usual when she was talking.) Was there a word for being drunk and high at the same time? Because she'd been getting free drinks all night, and she and Sirius had definitely taken some of the...whatever Sirius had offered him on the way to the concert that someone told Lyra about sometime between arriving at the club and Sirius starting a fight with someone who objected to the way he and Blaise were dancing.

(Which was, admittedly, _very_...suggestive. Harry had no idea if Sirius was actually trying to fuck with his head about Blaise — he should _never_ have asked him for advice on that, it hadn't helped, and now Sirius knew to tease him about it — or if he was just enjoying pretending to be twenty-five again, but watching the two of them was making this whole evening not only kind of weird and uncomfortable, but also _incredibly frustrating_.)

And then there had been the afterparty, with the hookah and the brownies (Harry had had half of one, and his head still felt _weird_) and more alcohol and Sirius disappearing to hook up with some girl he'd been chatting up and Blaise trying to teach him how to 'crowd surf' — using legilimency to get a feel for the energy of a group and letting it carry you away, kind of like getting lost in someone else's thoughts, but much more...generalised. He was pretty sure he hadn't done it right, because the scene was pretty mellow, but Harry just kept getting more uncomfortable. Especially since whatever those pills were had made Lyra weirdly touchy-feely, like Blaise when there were dementors around. But only with the three of them. (Blaise had caught her trying to break the fingers of some creep that grabbed her arse as they were leaving the concert.) Mostly Sirius, actually, whenever he wasn't obviously trying to pick up someone else (and sometimes even when he was, which weirdly didn't seem to be a deterrent). Which was...mostly just _really _uncomfortable. Because, well...

They were _cousins_, right? _First_ cousins. (Once removed, if Lestrange counted, but Harry really didn't think she did — technically she and Lyra had the same DNA, which meant Lyra's biological father and Sirius's mother were brother and sister.) _And_ they might _look _the same age now — he, Blaise, and Lyra had aged themselves up about ten years, and Sirius had de-aged about the same — but that didn't change the fact that he was still twenty years older than her, really, it just made them look like brother and sister instead of father and daughter. And had he mentioned they were cousins? Because _they _seemed to have _forgotten _that, all teasing and joking and flat out _flirting_ with each other, sharing cigarettes and whispering and giggling behind people's backs. (Or, as Blaise suggested, just forgot that they weren't supposed to do that sort of thing in public. Apparently Black incest jokes were a _thing_, like dumb blonde jokes. Except more based in reality.)

And even if they _weren't_ cousins, and Sirius _wasn't_ twenty years older than Lyra, Harry was still pretty sure he wouldn't be comfortable with the two of them being like this with each other, because if he didn't know any better (and he wasn't sure he did), he'd say they were competing with each other to see which of them could come up with the stupidest thing to do.

Aside from starting fights and the almost breaking fingers incident and dragging Harry into a mosh pit (which, Lyra was insane, that wasn't fun at all) and the drugs — where the hell did Sirius get those, anyway? — Lyra had spent over an hour using wandless magic to convince a bunch of stoned groupies that she had some kind of telekinetic powers (which..._technically_), and Sirius had suggested that they _steal a bloody motorbike_ and go for a joyride. The only reason he hadn't done it was because only two of them would be able to fit on a single motorbike, and Sirius was the only one who knew how to drive one.

And then Sirius had brought up the ocean again, and Lyra had hailed a cab — though she refused to get in it, insisted she'd catch them up later — and before he knew it, Harry was standing on a beach, waves washing over his feet, watching the two of them and Blaise strip to go skinny-dipping by moonlight. It probably wasn't the _most _surreal thing he'd ever seen, but it kind of seemed like it, in the moment.

He was suddenly aware that this was the furthest he'd ever been from home, and struck by how...normal and not normal it was, all at once. There wasn't any _magic_ magic to it — well, other than Sirius popping into his dog form to frolic in the waves — but for a brief, glorious moment, he'd thought he'd understood what Lyra meant, when she said that the entire universe was on their side tonight. Like he was _exactly _where he was meant to be, in the moment.

And then the police had shown up on the road behind them, lights flashing, shouting about this being a private beach, and how they shouldn't be swimming at night or without a lifeguard, anyway, and they'd grabbed their clothes and tore off down the shoreline, completely starkers. Harry had, of course, run along with them, though he had the advantage of still wearing his trousers, rather than trying to carry them. Blaise discovered, when the police finally stopped chasing them and they stopped to get dressed, that he'd lost his somewhere along the way, had to have Sirius duplicate Harry's.

Of course, by the time they stopped and got dressed and decided they should probably try to find their way back to their building, if only because Sirius was _starving to death_, it was _far_ too late to find a cab, and they were well and truly lost. They were also barefoot — none of them had grabbed their shoes, back at the beach — the three of them still had wet hair, Lyra and Sirius were still insane and probably still under the influence of all the shite they'd taken over the course of the night, and they were all dressed like they'd just left the club. Harry was tired and had a headache he was going to blame on that brownie, and this was, he thought, a _terrible _state to be wandering around some part of a strange city that was starting to remind him uncomfortably of Knockturn Alley.

He was _pretty sure_ that woman Sirius had been flirting with, when he said he was going to ask for directions, was a hooker.

So of course this was the perfect time to encounter a group of half a dozen rowdy guys, maybe a little older than seventh-years, laughing and passing around a bottle of some kind of liquor, reminding Harry of Dudley and his gang — or what they'd probably be like in a few more years. Except Harry was pretty sure they were part of a _real_ gang, not just a bunch of spoilt middle-class kids from the suburbs.

They obviously spotted Sirius and Lyra, who had managed to get some distance ahead of Harry and Blaise and were now waiting for them to catch up — they had been dancing and skipping and racing ahead from one corner to the next just because they could — right around the time Harry spotted them.

"Hey, hey!" one of them said, smacking another in the arm. "Look, cuzz," he said, pointing at them, across the street. There was some laughing and a few exchanges that were too quiet for Harry to catch, and then the whole group of them starting meandering across the road, all false casualness and bravado. They spread themselves out to form a sort of threatening half-circle around the two Blacks, cutting off an easy escape.

"Oh, _fuck_," Harry muttered, his feet already carrying him toward the scene a bit faster, reacting to the sight of his friends in danger without any conscious input from his brain.

Before he could get more than two steps away, Blaise caught his arm. "Maïa's right, your hero complex is ridiculous. You should work on that."

"_What_? Come on, Blaise, we can't just— We have to—"

Blaise actually stopped moving completely at that. "We have to what? Lyra and Sirius can take care of themselves, we'd just get in the way."

Which...was a point. Harry didn't really know _what _he would do, he had far more experience with fighting giant snakes and teenage bullies than grown men intent on robbing him, but he just— They had to do _something_!

"You— It's six on two, and Lyra and Sirius are drunk! It's not like they're just going to hand over their wallets or whatever!" For one thing, they didn't _have_ their wallets — they'd given them to Harry to hold onto while they went swimming — but even if they _did_, he was _sure_ they'd think it was _much _more fun to start a fight when they were outnumbered three to one and probably get the shite beaten out of themselves, or worse — this was _America_, they could get _shot!_ He grabbed Blaise's arm, started dragging him toward the developing fight.

One of the guys said something, Harry caught the flash of a blade in his hand, though not the words. Whatever it was, the Blacks apparently thought it was _hilarious_.

"They're not _that_ drunk. Or at least, Sirius isn't, I assume Lyra's not either. Just let them handle it."

"They're going to get themselves killed, Blaise!"

"Oh, relax, they have it under control. If it gets really hairy, I'm sure they both know more than enough incapacitating magic to save themselves. We, on the other hand, actually _might _get killed if we draw too much attention, so keep it down, yeah?"

"_What?!_" Harry hissed, trying to keep his voice down, but seriously?! "Why wouldn't they use magic to defend themselves?!"

"Well, as best I can tell — Sirius _is _a _little _muddled at the moment — pretty much the same reason Lyra doesn't use magic when she's hunting spiders: it's too easy."

"What are you—"

Blaise reached out, guiding him toward Sirius's mind, pulling him a bit further in than he would have gone himself. It was disorienting enough that he stumbled in his own body, Blaise pulling him off the pavement to sit on the steps of a derelict building. He felt a flutter of amusement from Sirius, though he couldn't quite tell if it was directed at him, or both him and Blaise.

_What the hell are we doing, Blaise?_ Harry thought, allowing his discomfort and a bit of irritation to seep into the thought.

_Oh, relax, Harry. He knows how to occlude, he'll stop me if I try to go too far. But we wouldn't want to distract him, anyway, so we're just eavesdropping._

_Eavesdropping _meant maintaining superficial contact, kind of similar to 'casual legilimency', just picking up the person's immediate thoughts and emotions, but focused 'outward' to see and hear what they did.

Harry sent a rather resigned feeling of acceptance to Blaise. That was _fine_, he supposed. It wasn't like he _didn't_ want to see what was going on over there. He just... Never mind, he was being stupid, focusing on his issues with legilimency when there was an _actual_ _problem _developing a block and a half away.

"_Aww, look, Siri, he wants to play with us!" Lyra giggled, a nasty-looking knife appearing in her own hand._

"_Really, Bella? You brought your dueling knife to go clubbing? Where were you even _keeping _that thing?"_

"_Why wouldn't I bring it?" she asked, ignoring the question of where she'd kept it, though Harry was pretty sure the answer was in that weird shadow dimension she'd been playing around with for months, now. _

"_Hey! I _said _take off the necklace, bitch!" the guy with the knife snapped, obviously unconcerned about the weapon she'd drawn from nowhere. _

It's charmed, _Blaise thought at him. _See how it's all fuzzy around the edges, kind of blurry? That's an unobtrusive charm of some sort. A really good one, if it's also masking their conversation about it.

"_And the earrings," another added. _

_Sirius was distracted trying to decipher the tattoo on his neck, but not _too _distracted to give him a mad grin. "And _I _said if you don't bugger off, we're going to be forced to kick your arses halfway back to Britain," Sirius said. It actually sounded rather as though he hoped they _wouldn't_. _

"_And I said that sounded like fun," Lyra interjected._

"_Yes, because you're a bloody psycho." _

As though you have any room to talk, _Harry thought at him, before he could stop himself._

_Another flutter of amusement was directed at him, though Sirius was obviously more focused on the guy with a blue bandanna off to his left. Something about the way he was holding himself, Harry thought, though he wasn't quite sure _what_._

"_We might be insane, Siri, but we're not psychotic. Oh, shut up, Eris, I'm not _that _floaty."_

What the fuck?

I have no idea. _Blaise's thought was tinged with a distinct note of exasperation_. Maybe they actually did get their hands on some Dragonsbreath.

_Yeah, Harry was just going to file that away on his list of weird things about Lyra he had thought would be explained when he figured out who she really was, but hadn't been. _Whatever_._

_Sirius sniggered. "Not psychotic, says the girl talking to the voices in her head."_

"_Did I say that aloud? Oops." She could barely keep a straight face long enough to get the words out, but before Sirius could follow up with another question, the guy with the bandanna, the one Sirius had been watching out of the corner of his eye, lifted the front of his shirt, revealing the handle of a pistol tucked into his belt._

"_Stop fucking around," he said coolly, his tone confident and self-assured, as though no one in their right mind would continue to resist an attempted mugging when badly outnumbered by armed men, _and _one of them had a gun._

_Not, of course, that either Lyra or Sirius was in their right mind. Ever. "Hey, Siri, should I teach them why you don't bring a gun to a knife fight?"_

_Sirius started laughing, even as the guy with the gun said, "It's the other way around, sweetheart — don't bring a _knife _to a _gun _fight."_

"_Not if I'm only two feet away from you." Her knife was at his neck faster than blinking, its outline clear and sharp, now, whatever charm she'd had on it broken as she drew too much attention to it. She froze momentarily, as though to make her point, then smirked and drew a thin red line under the guy's ear before she withdrew, standing in the same spot as before with a cocky tilt to her hips and a shit-eating grin. _

_The rest of them pulled their weapons, then -— only one other had a gun, but two more had knives, and one had a heavy-looking set of brass knuckles. Every one of them looked ready to kill them for the couple bits of jewelry Lyra had on her, or if either of them so much as moved. _

"_Really, Trixie?"_

"_Don't worry, I may not be Other Bella, but I'm pretty sure we can take them."_

_Sirius sighed, abruptly switched languages, to Welsh, Harry thought. Which was kind of annoying, Harry didn't speak Welsh any more than the Americans did, and he wasn't _nearly _as good as Blaise when it came to picking up the meaning behind words he didn't understand, or just communicating without words in general. There was a brief exchange during which Lyra rolled her eyes and Sirius's tone went very stern, but it was quickly cut off by one of the guys with a knife deciding he didn't like the way they were clearly planning something, and rushed Sirius from his left._

What— _Harry began. _

_He didn't even need to finish the thought before Blaise responded. _He told her not to use magic, and she said of course she wouldn't, didn't need to. Then he added that they shouldn't kill anyone, either.

_It was kind of hard to tell what happened next, since everything was from Sirius's perspective, and Harry wasn't great at interpreting what he was seeing, he'd never tried to eavesdrop on someone in a bloody _knife fight _before. But he _thought _Sirius had sort of stepped aside and turned, let the guy's stab at him go wide. He got a momentary glimpse of the one Lyra had cut — the leader? — grabbing her arm to control her knife, trying to pull her into some kind of hold before there were brass knuckles swinging at his head. He ducked, elbowed the guy behind him in the nose — Harry hadn't even realised he was _there — _and kicked another in the knee, sending him to the ground, though he rolled back to his feet almost immediately. _

_Harry wasn't sure, but he _thought _most of them were focused on Sirius. He probably looked like the bigger threat — he was a bit taller than Lyra, though still shorter than most of their attackers, and the age potions had started to wear off a while ago, so he definitely _looked _older and tougher. _

_But, well, Lyra was _vicious_. _

_The guy with the gun managed to take her knife from her, holding her nearly off the ground by the arm and prising it from her fingers with his other hand, but this left _his _weapon undefended at his waist — obviously he couldn't try to shoot Sirius with his friends all around, which made him and the other guy with a gun (who had his out, but clearly couldn't find a safe target) pretty much useless. Lyra grabbed it and chucked it away down the street, then grabbed his ear and _twisted_._

_The man shrieked, dropping her as he slapped a hand to the side of his head, then dropping to the ground as she kneed him in the balls. She followed up with a kick in the head, after which he stopped moving. _

"_I said don't kill anyone, Bella!" Sirius complained, grabbing a knife-man's wrist and chopping him in the throat before twisting him into a hold which, when he immediately tried to wrench himself free, broke his arm. He retreated with a pained howl._

"_I _didn't_. I don't think," she said, throwing a doubtful glance at the guy who was, at the very least, unconscious, sidestepping a thrust from another knife, spinning around to sweep the legs out from under one of Sirius's assailants. He tripped, stumbled off the pavement and into the street._

_Sirius caught sight of blood on Lyra's hands as she reclaimed her weapon, settled into a crouch facing the other guy with a gun, keeping the two of his friends who were still fighting Sirius behind her so that he wouldn't shoot. One of them managed to get in a solid blow to his kidneys, sending him to his knees and thoroughly distracting him from his insane cousin's fight. He fended off a kick from one, grabbed his trouser cuff and yanked him off balance, though that move left him unable to avoid the brass knuckles aimed at his ribs and the follow-up blow to the gut. _

_The air was knocked out of him like being hit by a bludger, but before the guy could finish him off, the one Lyra had tripped lunged at her. She feinted, dodged, and shoved him into Knuckles, whose head hit the wall behind them hard enough that Sirius judged him to be out for the count. The gunman she _had _been concentrating on — who had long since realised he wasn't going to be able to shoot her without hitting anyone else and holstered his weapon — took advantage of her momentary distraction to get an arm around her neck, throttling her as he struggled to get the gun — now caught between them — back into his hand._

_Sirius rolled back to his feet to face the two remaining knife-wielders, who finally seemed to have realised the value of coordination, circling around him, getting ready to attack from opposite angles. Said coordination failed almost immediately, however, as one of them was distracted by Gun Two screaming. Understandable — Sirius couldn't help but glance over himself. Lyra had stabbed him in the leg, a non-fatal wound to the right quadricep, and used the distraction to sink her teeth into the arm which _had _been wrapped tightly around her throat. He forgot about the gun, grabbing her by the hair with his other hand, trying to pull her off._

_The knife guy who hadn't been distracted thought to use _Sirius's _momentary distraction against him, closed quickly, using his blade as though he actually had some experience with the weapon. He was forced to fend it off with his hands, taking a long slice along his right forearm, but getting the knife out of the way long enough to find his solar plexus with a quick jab. He dropped his weapon and fell back, the breath knocked out of him, as his friend realised he was supposed to be attacking as well._

_Sirius snatched up the fallen knife, fell to circling the kid — he seemed younger than the others, less experienced — who was obviously leery of closing now that Sirius was armed as well._

_There was a wet snap behind him, the kid's eyes going wide as Lyra's gunman screamed bloody murder. Sirius took the opportunity to duck in, catch him with an uppercut, knocked him _right _out._

"I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's safe to approach, now," Blaise said calmly, offering Harry a hand back to his feet before tucking his thumbs into his conjured pockets and strolling toward the carnage.

"Holy _shit_," Harry muttered. It had seemed like a lot going on from Sirius's perspective, but looking at it like this... Somehow the aftermath looked worse than it had in the moment.

Three of the guys were out cold, one collapsed against a building holding his broken arm, covered in vomit, clearly in shock. One, disarmed, had his hands in the air, surrendering to Sirius. The last one, the one that had tried to strangle Lyra, had a broken leg. He was trying to pull himself down the road with his arms and his one good leg, whimpering as she walked slowly alongside him, giggling and kicking his gun _just _out of his reach with every step.

Sirius sent the one who had surrendered running before turning to survey the damage. "Well, that was fun," he said, grinning, before he noticed what Lyra was doing. "Bella, stop playing with your food. I sent that kid to get help for his friends, it shouldn't take _that_ long before the muggle Aurors show up."

"But _Siri_, he tried to break my neck," Lyra whined, kicking the gun away again and hopping over the man's arm as he made a swipe at her ankles.

"Yes, and?" he said, then cast some kind of spell at the one whose arm he'd broken.

"_And_ I think that makes him an acceptable target."

Harry kind of agreed, but teasing him like that was a little fucked up. Like, even more fucked up than he generally expected from Lyra. Especially since if he actually _did_ manage to get the gun back, he'd probably kill her.

"_Acceptable target_?" Sirius repeated, before Harry could decide exactly how to explain how fucked up this was, as he bent over to make sure the one she'd kicked in the head was still breathing. (He was, Harry had already checked.) "He's a bloody muggle, and you've already broken his knee. Now you're just being sadistic."

"_Yes, and?_" she said mockingly, then sighed. Pouted. "No one ever lets me have any fun." She stuck her tongue out at Sirius before casually stomping on the gunman's hand (Harry winced, his stomach turning — that _definitely _hadn't been necessary), rendering him unable to use his weapon, even if he _had _managed to find it after she kicked it into the gutter. (It might have gone down a storm drain.) He screamed, pulling his hand protectively to his chest, glaring up at them and muttering curses which were entirely ignored.

"Yeah, okay, _Bellatrix_."

"You keep comparing me to her as though it's an insult," she noted. "But I really don't think it is."

Even though Harry had already kind of known that, her blasé admission made him even more uncomfortable than seeing her crush that guy's hand when she'd obviously already thoroughly won their fight. When they'd talked about it — _kind of_ — a few weeks ago, he'd pointed out that Lestrange was infamous for torturing people into insanity and had a body count that might have been higher than Riddle's by the end of the war, not to mention she was a complete _fanatic_ and had gone to Azkaban voluntarily rather than forsake Riddle. She had pointed out that 'Bella' was also responsible for developing _stable time travel_ and organising a goblin rebellion _as a distraction_ back in '75. (And also that Riddle had had her under some kind of mind control, which just..._seriously_? Nobody believed the Imperius Defense!) He'd told her that no matter how brilliant she was, Lestrange was still fucking insane, and just _evil_, at which point she had started laughing at him because, "_Evil_ is a matter of perspective, and you _do_ realise _your_ mother was Lily Evans, right?" Which had pretty much ended the conversation, since Harry had gotten pissed off because Lily hadn't been a saint, okay, he knew that, but she hadn't tortured people to death, making that comparison just...wasn't okay.

The point was, Lestrange _really _wasn't the sort of person anyone should want to be compared to, even for the shock value, and Harry was definitely _not_ okay with the way Lyra...kind of seemed to look up to her, in a way. Not that he had any idea what to do about that.

Sirius apparently thought she was just saying that in a bid to get him to knock it off, like he was only doing it to bug her, and he'd stop if he knew it wasn't. "Nice try. I'll stop when you admit you're really her."

"As amusing as this is," Blaise interrupted, "we really should get out of here before anyone else shows up."

"Ugh, _fine_."

"Yeah, alright, just let me..." Sirius pulled his wand, cast a sleeping charm at the one Lyra had been taunting, followed by...some kind of healing spell, Harry thought, on his knee. The same thing he'd done to the shocky one with the broken arm.

"What was that?" Harry asked.

"Well I wasn't just going to leave them with shattered joints, was I? Those _never _heal right without magic."

Which was...good of him? Really, Sirius confused Harry a lot of the time. He didn't have a problem with breaking someone's knee in the first place, but _did_ have a problem with leaving it that way? Somehow Harry kind of felt that he should either want to entirely avoid doing shite like breaking knees, or else not care at all. The way he treated Lyra was similarly _weird_. He compared her to a psychotic murderer pretty much constantly — and not always entirely as a joke, either, like just now — but it...didn't actually seem to _bother_ him, Harry guessed. And he...kind of thought it should? It definitely bothered _him_. But even if she did remind Sirius of Lestrange, he still obviously enjoyed her company. (And Harry wasn't even going to touch the weird incest-y flirting thing.)

Lyra scoffed at him. "They wouldn't have healed _you _if they'd managed to shoot you."

"Don't care," Sirius replied lightly.

"Should we, um...do something? To, you know, get rid of any evidence?" Not that Harry knew what those things might be, but he suspected Sirius did, at least. He _had_ been an Auror, back in the War. (As well as a vigilante operating outside the law, before he was wrongfully imprisoned while trying to carry out a revenge killing and eventually became an escaped convict. Harry suspected he hadn't been a very _good_ Auror, at least when it came to _enforcing _the law. But he probably _did_ know how to _break _the law and not get caught.)

"I guess we could obliviate them," Blaise suggested, though he didn't seem too concerned about it.

Lyra groaned. "We didn't actually use magic on them, _perplexus_ is probably enough for them to dismiss anything weird we might have said."

"Sleeping charms and healing spells won't trigger a law enforcement alert, but memory modification would," Sirius informed them. "Same for anything to obscure our identities. If you want to compel them to keep anything weird they might have seen or heard to themselves, that's fine, but the magical authorities are _much _more likely to track us down than the muggle Aurors. Pretty sure an attempted mugging gone wrong will never get high-enough up in the muggle law-enforcement system for them to refer it to their magical counterparts."

"Especially since we didn't kill any of them," Lyra added.

"Yeah, okay, but what about, like, fingerprints? And Sirius is bleeding, they could get DNA..." Granted, everything Harry knew about forensics was things he'd seen on telly, but he was pretty sure that was something to be concerned about. That one guy had probably pulled out some of Lyra's hair, too...

Blaise shrugged. "Yeah, if it was mages, we'd have to worry about blood tracking, but the muggles wouldn't have anything to compare it to." _It's fine, Harry. It'll be much more suspicious if we scrub the scene than if we just leave it, _he added silently, reassurance almost overwhelming in his mental 'tone', which was not only slightly patronising, but also made Harry wonder exactly how he was so confident about that. It was...not entirely unexpected that Lyra would have opinions on how to best cover up evidence of her crimes — she did somehow manage to get him out of Hogsmeade and make it look like he'd bloody _died_ — but when had _Blaise_ ever done anything he'd need to cover up?

"Are you going to compel them not to talk?"

"Nah, they _were _trying to mug them, and I'm pretty sure the blue means they're Crips? So I kind of doubt they'll actually go running to the cops, anyway. If we just go, it should be fine."

Harry wasn't entirely sure about that, it felt...wrong, just _leaving_, like they were leaving themselves _exposed_. He sort of wanted to just compel them _himself_ — compulsions were _easy_ (scarily so, almost) — but he had never tried to set a compulsion to last longer than a couple of minutes, and he was pretty sure this wasn't the best time to try to start experimenting with that. And, well...he did have to admit that the rest of them seemed to have a better idea what they were talking about. "Fine, let's just get out of here, then."

Blaise nodded, but while they'd been talking, Lyra and Sirius had gotten distracted again.

"Do you really expect me to believe that you were raised by a cursebreaker who's been dead longer than you've been alive? Pull the other one, Bella."

"Do you really expect me to care whether you believe me or not?"

"Come on, let's go back to the flat," Blaise said, throwing an arm around Lyra's shoulders and interrupting their bickering.

She rolled her eyes. "Fine, fine. Which way did that whore say it was, again?"

"I'm sure you know I meant let's go _directly _back to the flat."

"I'm not sure I did. Aren't you having fun? I'm having fun." She grinned at them, as peppy and delighted with herself as ever, despite her quickly-developing black eye and the blood that had gotten on her face when she bit that goon.

Not for the first time, Harry asked himself why he hung out with her. Insanity was clearly contagious.

"No. Harry and I are tired, and Harry hasn't been having fun since we got to the club. Sirius still hasn't gotten dinner, and if we're not back by sun-up Mira will be annoyed with you. Don't you have plans in the morning, anyway?"

Lyra pouted up at him. "That's like, four hours from now."

"Yes, and some of us would like to spend those four hours sleeping. Please take us back."

"Ugh, _fine_. Siri, bring Harry," she said, wrapping an arm around Blaise's waist and turning on her heel, disappearing with a _crack_.

Harry stared at the spot they'd vanished from for a long moment. He wasn't entirely able to keep the outrage from his voice when he finally found his words again. "Are you telling me we could have just _apparated _back at any time? What the _fuck—_!"

Sirius just grinned at him. "Well...yes? But we were on an _adventure_."

"I'm never going out with you again," he informed his godfather. "_Never_."

* * *

_It still amuses me that Leigha's Sirius and Bellatrix are basically the same person, but just had different life experiences. —Lysandra_

_This one seems a bit sketchy and minimalist, even for me, but I did manage to hit all the points I wanted to as far as character dynamics and Harry's legilimency training go, and it is just a summer scene, so I'm going to call it good enough and move on._

_There were a couple of fun bits I didn't quite manage to work in, though. The original ending was to have Blaise just give the muggers a few hundred dollars before they left, tell Harry he thought they owed them something for their troubles, because Lyra and Sirius may have traumatised them for life. Also, please assume that after they dropped off Harry and Blaise, Sirius and Lyra did go out and steal a motorbike. The reason Lyra doesn't like cars is that they're moving iron boxes with enough large holes in them to do weird, disorienting things to the currents of ambient magic inside. Motorbikes, on the other hand, are fucking great._

_And, for anyone who is interested, Sirius starting a fight involved a lot of confusion about the words fag and bum. Because Brits._

_—Leigha_


	25. Orgasms are fun

As always seemed to be the way of such things, when things did go bad they went _very_ bad, _very_ quickly.

Lyra and Sylvie had stumbled across one of the spiders — rather far out of their normal territory, in fact, close enough to one of the other wilderfolk clans Sylvie suddenly seemed more intense than usual. It was a simple matter to track the thing, and they could have killed it almost immediately. One little adolescent acromantula — this one couldn't be more than three feet across, and it seemingly hadn't noticed them following it — was hardly sporting odds against the two of them, it wouldn't be difficult at all. Of course, that it would be easy would therefore make it boring.

But Sylvie had indicated they should follow it for a while, see where it was going. (She didn't _say_ it, since the canine throat wasn't really equipped for English, but they'd gotten pretty good at silent communication by now.) At a guess, Sylvie was concerned about one so young being so close to one of their clans — ones this little usually didn't wander this far from the nest alone. If the acromantulae were planning something, perhaps splitting their single nest into smaller, more mobile ones, it would be in the best interests of the other beings of the forest to have some forewarning. At least, Lyra thought that's what this was about, Sylvie couldn't get across ideas that complicated without switching back to human form, which the spider they were following would certainly hear.

Not that Lyra _at all_ minded the delay. While this summer had certainly been more entertaining than she'd had any right to expect, it did have its downsides. Since coming to this timeline, it was _very_ possible she'd gotten out of practice at...

Actually, now that she thought about it, she wasn't sure she'd _ever_ been in the practice of pretending to be a normal person for long periods of time. She hardly had to bother at home — little Meda hadn't known about Eris, but she'd _also_ accepted her behaviour as just Bella being Bella, and nobody else in the house much expected her to act anything like a normal human being anymore. The Monroes, when she stopped by their manor with Ciardha, had mostly gotten used to her as well (though they had still found her rather disturbing even by the end). She hadn't needed to keep up the act with Zee, had hardly lasted a couple months into first year — Zee had in fact been perhaps the single person she'd needed to pretend with least, and the single person (besides maybe Ciardha) she spent the most time around.

Since coming to this timeline, well, mostly she'd been around Zee and Blaise, who was perhaps even _more_ comfortable with her than Zee had been. Increasingly Maïa, but she'd had to pretend less and less as the months went on, and she could always get away to relax when she felt she needed to. That was the great advantage of living at Hogwarts, actually, one she hadn't anticipated: when all those petty expectations and limitations of daily human society started feeling too confining, _suffocating_, she could always run out to the forest and go kill things with Sylvie. She'd been oddly comfortable the second half of the year, she could only assume that was why.

But this American vacation of theirs... She hadn't realised just how _tiring_ it would be. If it were just the Zabinis and Sirius, who was _far_ more entertaining than she'd been led to expect, she might not have any issues, but Harry was a problem. Well, not a _problem_, exactly, but he was still too much of a normal person for Lyra to not keep up the act of humanity. And it was _hard_, as much effort as she was putting into it she wasn't doing very well. (It didn't help that Blaise had told him she was Bella's daughter.) Harry was, if anything, only growing _more_ suspicious and wary around her, and it was bloody _exhausting_. Sometimes, she just felt so tired, but not in a way that made her not want to do anything, but instead an itch she couldn't scratch, the urge to do something messy and noisy and absurd just because she was _bored_, and she _needed_ something interesting to happen.

If she hadn't had her portals back to Britain and Sylvie, she probably would have snapped and hexed one of Blaise's insufferable American friends by now.

There was something about this place, she couldn't quite put her finger on it. It wasn't just the magic here — and the forest _was_ an impressive hotspot of ambient magic, having built up over the centuries, accelerating as magical creatures and beings congregated and multiplied, so thick it tingled in her lungs with every breath, tickling at her skin. It was something about the...the _wildness_ of it, the plants allowed to spread undirected by human hands, natural forces held in a precarious balance, the violence but also the peace of it, a... She didn't know, the absence of civilization was almost a _tactile_ thing, a lifting of weight holding her down, she always felt lighter out here, more _herself_, if that made sense. (She wasn't sure it did.)

There were good reasons she (and Eris) and Artemis more or less got along, after all. In another life, she sometimes thought, one in which the Blacks weren't quite so thoroughly steeped in the Dark, she might well have found herself falling in with her favourite Light goddess instead. There was a sort of wild joy she felt in embracing the freedom of the forest, a gleefulness in letting those savage impulses advanced society suppressed fly free, to run and hunt and play and kill. As Lyra was now, she wasn't inclined to stay for long — the potential for chaos here was minimal, the forest static, unchanging, in a way human society was not (not to mention there simply were no such things as enchanting or wards or even libraries here) — but she could imagine another her might feel fully at home in the forest, might leave humanity entirely behind and stay here forever.

Shite, she might even be inclined to find some way to exploit blood alchemy to make herself wilderfolk, so she could integrate properly — if Liz Potter could make _bloody human-veela hybrids_, she didn't see why that shouldn't be possible. Actually, she should look into that anyway, that sounded like an _excellent_ idea.

But, if nothing else, the forest was an almost ideal temporary escape from humanity, a way to release the pressure, to keep herself sane.

So, even though they could have killed this one little spider and had done with it nearly an hour ago now, Lyra didn't feel a hint of impatience. She paced alongside Sylvie, the pale, waist-high wolf almost ghostly silent, magic almost instinctively flowing through Lyra with every breath, turning her body light, her steps silent, branches gently bent out of her path. Revelling in the dirt against her feet, the wind against her skin, when they occasionally paused, letting their quarry open up a little distance before moving on again, she would crouch down at Sylvie's side, hidden amongst the muted folds of the forest night, leaning her face into the wolf's neck, breathing her in even as Sylvie did her, life and sweat and green and magic, a contented grin pulling at her lips.

She didn't think she ever felt more comfortable than she did, here.

It was possible that, enjoying herself as much as she was, she hadn't been paying _quite_ so much attention to her surroundings as she should have been. But then, Sylvie hadn't seen the ambush coming either.

The only warning was the familiar snickering of mandibles, quiet, hardly a whisper. Both Lyra and Sylvie perked up, glancing toward the left. Neither of them saw the attack coming from above. Lyra didn't notice the shadow falling upon her — another acromantula, older, legspan wider than she was tall — until she felt the spark of the thing's mind, _far_ too close, an instant and it would have her. Instinctively, Lyra shifted through shadows, reappearing next to Sylvie.

Another spider had gotten the drop on her, one even larger and more vicious-looking than the one that had targeted Lyra, nicked with scars from innumerable fights over the years — Lyra wasn't sure what to think of the implication that they saw Sylvie as the greater threat, but she supposed she had been hunting them for longer than Lyra had, probably had a significantly higher body count. While Sylvie couldn't disappear into shadows, she _was_ quicker than Lyra: despite being pinned against the forest floor by the much heavier spider, she _had_ managed to twist out of the way of its fangs at the last moment. Before it could make any attempt to off her, Lyra's spear had already been driven into its head, piercing its brain, killing it in an instant. Before she could pull it back out, Lyra heard a rustling behind her, let go and threw herself to roll over the corpse (and Sylvie under it), barely getting out ahead of another pair of fangs.

Lyra took a quick glance around, cursed — they were _surrounded_, there had to be dozens of them, a mass of skeletal shadows shifting in the moonlight. Apparently, they were learning. While this wasn't _entirely_ a bad thing — if the acromantulae didn't adapt their tactics to counter them, it'd probably get boring eventually — she and Sylvie did rather need to get out of this mess alive. It would be easy to destroy them all if Lyra had her wand on her, but she'd left it at Ancient House. (Using her wand on acromantulae just seemed...unsporting.) They'd never taken on this many at once by themselves and, judging by the silent tension where Eris lived in her head, she had as many doubts about their ability to kill them all as Lyra did.

So, they were running, then. Lyra could do that.

There was an odd tingling of magic on the air, Sylvie casting some sort of charm on the corpse pinning her to the ground. While only a minority of wilderfolk could cast magic — though nobody had any idea exactly what the proportion looked like, there'd never been any proper demographic studies of wilderfolk — Sylvie was one of them, a comparatively powerful one at that. More powerful than many ordinary mages Lyra's age, certainly, though not exceptionally so. Lyra could count on her fingers the times she'd seen Sylvie actually cast any magic, though, and the instinctive charm was completely unfamiliar, she couldn't guess what it did just by feel.

By how quick Lyra's freeform banishing sent the corpse into the spider that'd nearly killed her a second ago, she'd guess some sort of primitive featherweight charm. All right, then.

She winced at the loss of her spear — she'd been slowly altering the thing over the months, all those charms and enchantments she'd put into it...

Sylvie leapt into motion with a furious howl, the night crackling with wild power. For an instant Lyra was worried Sylvie meant to stand and fight — wilderfolk had their own fiery sort of pride — but she was darting away through the brush before Lyra could say anything. Lyra chased after her through shadows, even as another damn acromantula pounced at her, she heard the thing crash into a tree when she reappeared, keening and angry chittering filling the air. She'd come back just a couple steps behind Sylvie, just in time to see her weave between the legs of a bloody _monster_ of a spider, the thing too cumbersome to keep up with her.

With an easy flex of magic, Lyra jumped into the air, smoothly landing on the thing's back — she hadn't had time to look into proper levitation, Bella had reminded her of the possibility only two days before, but short little jumps like this were trivial. A thousand bristly hairs scratched at her skin, but Lyra ignored it, ducked to press her hand against the join between its head and torso and forced magic through the contact. The spider's carapace shredded, blue-black blood welling up between her fingers and splashing up to her elbow, she jumped again as it convulsed, landed roughly, nearly turning her ankle, Sylvie a shifting shape in the near distance, Lyra ducked under another pouncing spider, stepped back into shadows.

She came out still a dozen paces behind Sylvie — seriously, she was so bloody _fast_ — but well-situated to note the acromantulae paralleling them up in the trees. (There were so fucking many of them, they were so _very_ fucked.) A pair leapt down toward Sylvie, Lyra skipped through shadows, threw off another banishing even as she surfaced, the one she'd hit crashing into the other, sending both off-course, she stepped back—

Something heavy crashed into her from behind, throwing her off her feet, tumbling across the forest floor. She hitched to a rest at the base of a tree, scratched and bruised, her head spinning. Dazed, it took a few seconds to push herself to her knees — far too long. She finally looked up, only to find _another bloody spider_, _far_ too close, she reached for her magic and—

Sylvie appeared as a gold-white blur streaking in from the right, crashing into the spider halfway down its body. She must have done some kind of spell — its body caved in with a grinding crunch, rocketing away far quicker and further than it should, smashing itself to pieces across the ground and four separate trees. Now that it was gone, Lyra could see six more crowding in behind it, she didn't have time to cast anything, or even stand up.

Even as Sylvie's paws touched the ground, the magic around them stuttered, twisted, then _flared_, like a fire roaring explosively to life.

In a blink, like dozens of invisible severing curses slashing through the air, the spiders and the trees between and around them were torn to shreds, dark blood and wood chips flying. The first wave were dead instantly, the ones following them rearing back for a moment, keening and clacking, dodging branches and trunks crashing to the ground, scattering from the fires that bloomed where the magic had cut, starting small but quickly growing, until half of Lyra's vision was filled with blood and smoke and flames white and blue and orange, flooding the area with magic not dark nor light, but at once both and neither, wild and sharp and dangerous (but hauntingly beautiful). For a brief moment Lyra could only stare, temporarily awestruck.

_Woah_. Apparently, Sylvie was rather better at magic than Lyra had assumed.

Though that spell had obviously taken quite a bit out of her — Sylvie stumbled, nearly falling to the ground before recovering, teetering a bit with her first few steps. Lyra dragged herself to her feet, pulling up the side of her tree, pushing her own power into the flames, making them spread wider, rise quicker, buying the both of them more time to recover. As Sylvie padded past, Lyra shoved off her tree, nearly toppled to the ground, but Sylvie caught her, straining against her hip. Her head turned around, orange-gold eyes catching hers, her whine nearly covered by the cackling of the fires behind them, the chittering of the frustrated acromantulae.

"I'm fine," she said, carding a hand through the fur of Sylvie's neck. She pushed herself to her feet, still slightly shaky, but her head was clearing by the second. "Let's get the fuck out of here."

Sylvie let out a low wuff of agreement, again darting off through the brush.

Some long minutes of stumbling through the forest later, and Lyra finally let herself relax, collapsing to lay in a patch of grass in the middle of a very familiar clearing. They'd come here without any agreement or even really thinking about it, at least not on her part, out of habit, or instinct. A gap in the trees a dozen metres wide within a short ten minute walk of the edge of the forest, filled with a thick carpet of grasses and flowering weeds, it was the very place Hagrid had sent her to for her first meeting with Sylvie, had repeatedly served as the most convenient place to find each other. Lyra had been keeping her charmed spear here, in the hollow of a long-dead tree at the fringes, and it was where she would normally leave her clothing, hanging from the branches until it was time to return to the castle.

Of course, they didn't actually _need_ to come here. Lyra had lost her spear, and this time she'd undressed back at Ancient House and shadow-walked into the forest. (Come to think of it, when the school year started again she _could_ just leave her clothes in her room and pop straight here — she hadn't been able to shadow-walk when she'd started hunting with Sylvie, it hadn't occurred to her until just now.) In fact, they'd _only_ come here tonight for Lyra to pick up her spear, she'd appeared in the middle of Sylvie's clan this time.

Which _was_ still awkward — she'd been introduced a couple months ago now, but the rest of the wilderfolk still weren't entirely comfortable with her. She was _trusted_, yes, if only because Sylvie vouched for her and she volunteered to kill spiders for them, but they weren't used to her yet, still all too human and alien. Or, the adults weren't comfortable with her yet, at least. The kids liked her already — she got mobbed by dozens of excitable little balls of fluff whenever she showed up — but of course they did, she'd always been strangely successful at winning young children over without even trying, it was bloody weird. Which only made the adults even _more_ uneasy, so, yeah, she and Sylvie hadn't stayed for long, they never did.

So, they didn't _need_ to return to this particular spot, but apparently the routine was just ingrained by now.

Lyra had been laying on the grass-softened ground for a handful of seconds, staring up at the starry sky above, her still-laboured breathing quickly slowing back to normal. She was pretty sure that hit she'd taken had bruised her up pretty bad, and she could feel the stinging from scratches, she'd probably be digging into her store of healing potions tonight. But it wasn't as bad as it could have been, she'd be fine.

She jerked, instinctively twitching away from the cool, wet nose prodding at her side. Sylvie let out a low whine, sniffing at her, pawing at her a bit — not with her claws at all, just sort of prodding at her. "I'm fine, nothing's broken." She blindly reached up, her hand finding Sylvie's head, idly scratching along the base of one of her ears. "Are you okay? That one that pinned you didn't nick you with its fangs, did it?" Wilderfolk were rather more resistant to acromantula venom than humans were, but it did make them quite ill, having Cherri pick up some antidote would still be called for.

(When she'd started getting into the habit of hunting giant, man-eating spiders, she had whipped up a bunch of antivenom first, she wasn't an idiot.)

There was a peculiar flare of magic, and Lyra's fingers were suddenly tangled in longer, softer human hair instead. "I am good, now." Sylvie shuffled closer, throwing herself over Lyra, arm around her and face in her chest and leg over her hips. Which was very warm — especially since Lyra still wasn't cooled down from their whole near-death experience running battle thing — but that was fine, she didn't mind. "It had me, but you were there."

Lyra hummed, slipping her hand further back, fingers digging in to the base of Sylvie's skull; she let out a soft little groan, turning her face more firmly against Lyra's skin, shifting against her. "Yes, well, I'd have been fucked if you hadn't whipped that crazy magic out of nowhere, so, the feeling's mutual, I guess."

_You realise you could have slipped back home through shadows at any time_.

For a second, Lyra just blinked up at the night sky. _That...didn't even occur to me, actually. But I would have had to leave Sylvie behind, she might not have made it._

_Maybe_. Eris seemed far more amused than was entirely reasonable, her not-voice on the edge of laughter, but okay. _Your wild little friend is quite resourceful, but maybe. Of course, you could have just taken her with you._

_...You can do that?_

_Most people can't, no. But you have strong enough an affinity for shadows and know the feeling of Sylvie's magic well enough that you should be able to manage it. Keep it in mind, just in case something like this happens again._

_You really were worried I was going to die tonight, weren't you?_

An odd shade of disgust in Lyra's feel of her, Eris said_, There's something wrong with acromantulae, I'm not certain what it is. I have far more trouble seeing them than I should. I really don't like them._

_Oh, well, good thing we're—_

Lyra was startled out of her thoughts when Sylvie moved against her, her face tucking into her neck, her breath hot and loud and very distracting, nails dragging lightly along her side, leg turning to slip between Lyra's knees, dragging up, and she could feel...

_Wait, ah, what were we talking about?_

Eris giggled. _Never mind that, my _bellatrice_, just have fun with your adorable little sister-in-arms._

Lyra _meant_ to ask what that was supposed to mean, but then there were teeth at her ear, Sylvie's hand abruptly finding its way—

_Oh_.

Oh, so they were doing _this_ now.

Frowning into the hair covering her face — Sylvie always smelled like dirt and blood and sweat and magic, wild and powerful — Lyra hesitated for a second.

But only for a second.

* * *

"So, I get it now."

"_Ah!_ Trixie?!"

"Lyra, what are you _doing_ in here?"

Lyra blinked back at Zee and Sirius, tangled up in Zee's bed, glaring up at her and flailing to cover themselves. Which, that was sort of silly — she never had quite understood why people were so sensitive about nudity. "You know, I always thought the sex thing was kind of weird. But I think I get it now."

"How did you even get in here?"

"What the fuck are you _talking_ about?"

She ignored Siri's question, it was bloody obvious what she was talking about. "I shadow-walked in, of course"

"Lyra, the door was locked."

"Was it? I didn't check." Not that it mattered, it wasn't like a lock would stop...well, anyone in the house, really, Harry wasn't so useless he couldn't pull off a _basic unlocking charm_, honestly.

"We were _kind of in the middle of something_."

"You're not bothering me, go ahead." She shrugged. "Anyway, I get it though. Well, I mean, I don't _really_ get it — I still think how important people think this stuff is, the effort they'll put into it, all that is still silly. But the basic idea, sure. Orgasms are fun. I get it."

Siri let out a groan. "Morrigan have mercy on our souls, Little Bella's started screwing around. Do I even want to know?"

"Wilderfolk girl back at Hogwarts, you haven't met her." Lyra blinked. "Or...you have, now that I think about it — that was you at the Quidditch match, wasn't it?"

"You don't— You mean the little white and yellow one, always sticking her nose in things she shouldn't? You know, I would say it's hard to imagine you fucking a _bloody wilderfolk_, but if I had to pick one..."

"I know, she's great, right? Also, orgasms? Fun."

"Not gonna hear me disagreeing on—"

"_Do you two mind?!"_ Lyra didn't think she'd _ever_ heard Zee's voice get quite _that_ high and screechy, it was bloody weird. The glaring was also rather...well, Black-ish, Other Bella and Cissy had clearly been an excellent influence. "Lyra, _get out_."

"All right then, fine. Gods and Powers, Zee, I'm not _doing_ anything. I just thought you'd like to know I understand now that orgasms are fun and I get it."

"_Go!"_

"Yes, yes. Have fun!" With a parting grin, Lyra stepped back into the shadows.

* * *

_In case anyone was wondering, yes, a botched bioalchemy ritual to make people animagi/wilderfolk is my headcanon explanation for where werewolves come from. Lyra is aware of this, and considers it an acceptable risk. —Lysandra_

_I can't really express how much I enjoy Lyra and Sirius being pretty much the same person and all distractible and weird, even to Zee. May have to post the one where Sirius is manic and everyone goes clubbing next, for that exact reason..._

_Also, Sylvie is pretty and her magic is pretty and yes, this was planned from pretty much as soon as her character was introduced. —Leigha_

_Basically, we think Lyra and Sylvie are adorable and we ship it. —Lysandra_

_This scene takes place roughly around 2nd August, about three weeks after the one where Lyra acquires a muggleborn girlfriend. I'm sure you can all imagine that will cause no problems whatsoever. —Leigha_

_Leigha is debating whether to write more unnecessary comments because she is drunk and silly, and I'm just gonna spare you all that and post this now. —Lysandra_


	26. Hisses of Annoyance

As far as Harry was concerned, this was the best holiday he'd ever had. Yes, he was still having weird dreams about being Voldemort, and he still hadn't really figured out whatever was going on with Blaise, Lyra had been increasingly...Lyra-ish since he'd found out about the Lestrange thing, and spending more than a few hours with his godfather was kind of exhausting. Also, he still had to write his summer essay for Potions.

But he had a plan to deal with the dream thing — he'd read that book Snape had sent him, had been writing down his dreams in as much detail as he could remember (and he thought he was actually getting somewhere because he was starting to remember a _lot_ more than he had in the beginning). And regardless of how awkward Harry was around Blaise — because _just snog him _was _terrible_ advice, and it was kind of impossible to imagine Blaise being concerned about scaring him away, so that couldn't possibly be the problem — Blaise pretended not to notice, so that was..._fine_; Lyra had spent more days in Britain or France in the past six weeks than she had here, so he hadn't been subjected to _that _much disturbing Lyra-ish-ness; and Sirius actually kind of seemed to be avoiding him a lot of the time. Blaise thought it was because he didn't know how to deal with being a godfather, or kids in general. Harry thought it was because he reminded Sirius of his parents, and that was just...awkward (in an entirely different way than his awkwardness around Blaise). So it wasn't too difficult to get time away from him, anyway.

But he really had nothing to complain about: no matter how weird and awkward everyone around him was, they were living a life of luxury and there wasn't a Dursley in sight. They'd actually _gone to an amusement park _for _Harry's birthday_. And Blaise had told him that Lyra was going to be marking their Potions essays, because Snape had blackmailed her into it. (He didn't want to know.) So he was far less concerned about failing his summer homework than he might otherwise be — he'd just flat asked her what references to use, made the whole thing much easier.

That was what he was working on when she wandered into the living room and flopped onto the sofa with a heavy sigh. Well, he was mostly trying not to be annoyed that Blaise had gone to dinner with Mira and her husband and some business people and their kids, and Harry hadn't been invited. Not that he thought he would have enjoyed _going_, he'd met Blaise's American 'friends' (the term used very loosely, because Blaise acted like a completely different person around them, they hardly knew the real him at all). Most of them were kind of insufferable — reminded him of Parkinson more than anyone. Blaise didn't actually seem to like them much, either, they just happened to be thrown together at dinners like the one he was at now because their parents worked together in some way or another.

Even if it wasn't quite being told to sit in his room and pretend not to exist until everyone else had eaten, it still would have been nice to be invited. _Nothing to complain about_, he reminded himself sternly. _You didn't even really want to _go_._

"Hey Lyra. What's up?" he asked, glad for the distraction. He probably would have welcomed it even if he'd really been writing his essay — it had taken until this past year to realise it, but his hatred for Potions was almost entirely independent from his hatred for Snape. Trying to understand Potions theory textbooks was like trying to understand bloody _poetry_, all weird metaphors and associations and shite. It was terrible.

"I've been trying to figure out this Occlumency thing. It's not going well."

Harry gave her the most skeptical look he could muster at that, because seriously? He'd never met anyone who was better at Occlumency than Lyra. He'd tried to read her mind a few times recently. He'd spent two weeks or so of the holiday, after that first Voldemort dream, accidentally slipping into Blaise's mind, and Sirius's, and even Mira's, once, before he managed to train himself to just stay in his own damn mind-space all the time. But that meant he really couldn't do legilimency at all, and he had to pay attention to his own mind all the time, so after that, he'd started intentionally poking around the edges of other people's minds, not _intruding_ (or at least not intentionally), just peeking at their surface thoughts and emotions, practicing relaxing his control without losing it completely. (Which, yes, meant he was back to falling into other people's heads when he didn't pay enough attention, but everyone around him knew Occlumency, so they mostly just pushed him back out. He'd decided it was _fine_ because there was no way he was going to get better without practicing, but it still made him feel a bit shite, just..._barging in_ like that.) And it hadn't taken long at _all_ to notice that Lyra wasn't kidding when she'd told him forever ago that she hadn't learned normal Occlumency.

There was _nothing_ normal about the way her thoughts were just so..._solid_. Or, well, they were probably normal once you got past the...shell, was a better way to think of it, he supposed. He was pretty sure if her whole mind was like that, all the way through, she wouldn't be able to think at all? Thoughts and memories and emotions, they tended to kind of _flow_ as you were thinking, new ideas coming out of the intersections between old ones. The shell thing was still fucking weird, though. Normal people, their minds were soft, open. The whole point of Occlumency was to firm up the division between yourself and everything else, keep them separate. By that definition, Lyra's totally-not-normal ritual magic cheater Occlumency was basically perfect.

(It kind of freaked him out, actually. Not as much as accidentally wandering into other people's heads, but that just wasn't _right_.)

She rolled her eyes at his silent skepticism. "Oh, shut up, I mean _real_ Occlumency. Like, the organising your thoughts, actually _controlling _the barrier between self and other thing. Not just keeping people out." She sighed again. "Mind magic is hard."

"So, what are you actually trying to _do_?" Harry asked. Talking about Lyra being bad at something he was actually pretty good at was _way_ more interesting than Potions theory.

"Er..._not_ keep people out? Well, not keep myself _in_, more like, but that sounds weird."

Harry snorted, he couldn't help it. "Lyra, when _don't_ you sound weird?"

Lyra stuck her tongue out at him, but it was true, and she knew it. "Ignoring that, there's this thing called omniglottalism, it's one of those inherited abilities like Parseltongue or metamorphy or legilimency, and I've been informed that I probably am one, because apparently it's not normal to speak as many languages as I do—" (Which probably meant this omniglot thing had something to do with languages... He knew _omni_ meant _all_, but _glottal_...mouth? Er...throat? That was just a guess, he didn't know. Whatever, it was clearly a language thing, anyway.) "—even though I only speak like, two more than most Blacks, and Sirius speaks Greek too, but whatever. Also, that would be why I could understand everyone back in February when everyone got potioned."

"When you potioned everyone, you mean."

"I'm sure I couldn't possibly admit to having done such a thing. But yes. And Snape pointed out at the time that yeah, I'm pants at mind magic, but that's kind of what happens when you accidentally turn your mind inside-out, so."

"You did _what_?" Harry exclaimed — a knee-jerk reaction, he didn't really understand how that was _possible_. He didn't think it should be, really. It sounded as _wrong_ as, well... Okay, yeah, maybe that made perfect sense.

Lyra rolled her eyes. "You _are _a legilimens, I assume you've realised that minds and metaphysical space don't exactly exist in the same dimensions as our physical bodies. The ritual that did this to my head basically inverted my mind in one of those dimensions. What you perceive as the 'outside' boundary between my mind and the world is basically what would be the centre of my mind if I _hadn't_ done the ritual. My thoughts and memories still kind of expand from that point, though it's not really the _origin_ of them, just, you know, the middle. And because everything's turned around, 'expanding' actually means 'contracting' from your perspective. Er...I think. Maybe? Like I said, mind magic is hard. And it's not like there's a book on this. But anyway, I'm trying to figure out how to _not_ occlude all the time, because someone just reminded me that omniglottalism is a _thing_, and I can't use it to cheat at languages if I can't not occlude."

Right, definitely a language thing, then. And, weirdly enough, Harry thought that actually kind of made sense. Even more weirdly, it kind of gave him an idea. "Want me to try?"

"Try what?"

"Legilimising you. Obviously."

She snorted. "Well, I doubt it will work, but sure, why not."

He glared at her — would it kill her to _not_ be a patronising bitch, just this once, when they were doing something he was pretty sure he knew more about than she did? He channelled his annoyance into determination, set about trying to figure out how best to go about this. Basically his idea was, if it was always opposite day in Lyra's head for whatever fucked-up reason, clearly, instead of trying to make his mind match hers and push 'inward' toward the 'centre', he should try to make _her_ mind match _his_, and _pull_. Granted, he wasn't really sure what he expected to happen, but it seemed like _something_ should. It might end up being more of a legilimency something than an occlumency something, but...whatever. It sounded like the omniglot thing was more legilimency-_y_ anyway.

The problem was, he wasn't exactly sure how to go about making her mind resonate with his. He and Blaise had done reciprocal legilimency loads of times, but that was more like both of them actively trying to match the other. This, theoretically, seemed more like trying to...he didn't know. Force _her_ to match him.

"Er...are you doing anything?"

"No, shut up, I'm not— I just need to figure something out, let me think for a second."

The only thing that he could think of that was remotely like anything he thought he needed to do was actually compelling someone, which was, technically speaking, just pressing an imprint of an idea — _your_ idea — into someone else's mind, twisting a little bit of them to become like the bit of _you_ that was that idea. He hadn't actually practiced it much, it kind of bothered him, the idea of forcing his ideas and the shape of his mind on someone else.

More than that, it bothered him how _easy_ it was. Almost as easy as slipping into their minds in the first place.

Blaise had done it to him a lot when they'd first started practicing occlumency, mostly because it was _obvious_, easy to detect, even if you _weren't _a legilimens and hadn't the faintest idea what mind magic _was_. It kind of felt like _tweaking_ his thoughts into a different pattern, like...like being put in a body bind, when your arms and legs were pulled into a specific place, your spine forced into a particular shape as the spell pressed in around you. But not nearly as all-over, and much easier to break. Your thoughts were still your thoughts, even if they were shaped in the image of someone else's. All you had to do to break a compulsion was notice that it was there, and decide you didn't want to do whatever it was the compulsion was meant to make you do.

There were a few things you could do to make it harder to break them, or harder to notice them — he'd asked, after the whole (attempted) mugging _thing_ — and those were trickier (though not trickier enough, in Harry's opinion), but it wasn't really difficult to compel someone if you weren't trying to be subtle about it. You just...reached out and sort of _pinched _a bit of their mind and...

It was much easier to do than to explain, really. The closest thing he could think to compare it to was casting a spell (and he couldn't really explain how exactly he did _that_ either), except instead of channelling outside magic you sort of channelled the magic that made up the other person's mind, and it was still _theirs_, it didn't get thrown out into the world like a spell.

When he'd mentioned this to Blaise, asking more about _how_ it worked — because at first he'd thought he was doing something wrong, surely it _shouldn't_ be this easy to compel someone — Blaise had been completely surprised. Apparently he'd never noticed before that it was so similar. He said it _wasn't _actually that easy to do, Harry was just unusually good at it, but that he shouldn't really be surprised, because he was really good at casting magic in general.

Which was true, he guessed. Next to everyone else in their class... Hermione definitely knew more about how magic _worked_, all the theory nonsense that Harry found so confusing and useless, or else obvious and _really_ boring. But when he wasn't trying to think about how to do a thing, when he just focused on what he wanted to _happen_, he was always the first to get a new spell down. Well, after Lyra, but she'd learned almost everything they did in class years ago. (Some of the Slytherins definitely had, too, like Theo, for example, but they only ever had Potions together, so he couldn't say for sure how good they were at learning new spells.)

He'd asked her about it, after Blaise had pointed it out, the him being really good at magic thing. She'd just stared at him for about five seconds, as though she didn't understand what the hell he was talking about, before saying that _of course_ he was good at magic, he didn't think just _any_ thirteen-year-old could learn the Patronus Charm, did he? Magic didn't just show people how to cast a spell, either, _apparently_. He'd asked back in the spring if she'd ever heard of anything like the way the spell had kind of caught and tugged on that memory of Blaise being hurt. Back then she'd smirked and asked him how he thought mages had learned magic in the first place, which he'd taken to mean, yes, obviously that was a thing that happened. But when he asked if he was actually really good at magic, or if Blaise was just...he didn't even know, she'd said, "Are you fucking with me? Of course you are, Magic likes you. It likes you enough to _teach _you things. If you'd been raised with magic, well, you wouldn't be better than me, but I'm a dirty fucking cheater. You'd be able to give Theo a run for his money, though."

Which was kind of saying a lot — he'd seen Blaise's memory of Lyra and Theo fighting, and Theo was _really_ fucking good. Like, he'd known he was _good_ from that one time he'd come to their little unofficial dueling club, but Harry had _also_ seen Lyra and Sirius sparring by now, and he couldn't really see a difference, besides Sirius being much faster (casting silently) and using more elemental spells. If it was true that Harry could have been that good if he'd been raised in a magical family, he was starting to see why Lyra and Sirius (and practically everyone, it seemed like) thought it was terrible that Dumbledore had sent him to live with the Dursleys.

But that wasn't the point. The _point_ was, compelling someone was easy — far easier than Harry thought it had any right to be — and Harry was _pretty sure_ that if he just kind of..._started_ compelling Lyra, but didn't let it go, he could kind of use the connection to _pull_ at her mind instead of _pushing_ like a normal legilimency probe, which, if he had understood her little ramble, would end up pulling him into her mind, since out was in and up was down and Lyra was a crazy person.

Of course, he couldn't really get a good 'grip' on Lyra's mind, surrounding or mostly-surrounding a little bit of her metaphysical mind-space like he would for a normal compulsion. He couldn't just _completely _surround her, either. Regardless of whether the 'outside' of her _space _was all theoretically kind of a single point or not, it still _felt_ like it was about the same size as anyone else's, trying to wrap his mind around _all_ of hers seemed like a _fantastically _bad idea.

Instead he kind of just...established contact, brushing his mind up against the edge of hers and... The image that came to mind was like a suction cup, getting a grip on her thoughts by kind of glomming onto one. He wasn't trying to _do_ anything with it, just...get a better 'grip', really, but—

"Okay, what are you doing? That feels — _felt_—" (He'd lost his focus when she'd spoken, dropped his hold.) "—really fucking weird."

"Shut up, you're distracting me." He _could_ try to explain, but he was pretty sure it wouldn't make sense, what he was trying to do. It only half made sense to _him_.

Lyra sighed, but shut her mouth. Harry closed his eyes, trying to focus on just the magic and reached out again, inspecting the shell of her thoughts more closely than he had before, looking for any flaws he might exploit, because, well...that _had_ felt weird — he hadn't been focused on any specific bit of the shell when he was trying to suction-cup himself to it, but it _had_ felt like just a little bit of it had pulled away from the rest.

He didn't find any like he would expect in a normal person occluding, stray thoughts or areas where her focus was weak, but after a few minutes he realised that the shell wasn't _exactly_ just a single point — she _had_ said it was the _middle_ but not the _origin_, or something like that. He thought it was kind of more like a tornado, the currents of energy and thought that made it up turned away from him so that he just kind of glanced off of them when he tried to push his way in, but there _were_ multiple...threads, there. No, he liked the tornado comparison, he decided. Like it was all one thing, but it _could_ be divided into different sub-things, individual thoughts like separate gusts of wind with their own currents, but they were still all one bloody huge, solid wall of wind and...

Okay, maybe Lyra had a point about mind magic being hard. _Talking_ about it was hard, even trying to articulate it to himself was bloody impossible, here. People who actually needed to understand the theory behind their magic and how it all worked for it _to_ work probably couldn't do mind magic at all. (And Harry was pretty sure Lyra was one of those people, except she already _did_ understand how it all worked, so it was just as natural for her as it was for him, but she could also talk to Hermione about nerdy magic theory dragonshite when he'd just spent half of first and second years wondering why the hell they wasted so much time on it.)

Actually _doing_ mind magic, like doing _any_ magic, was _much _simpler once you stopped overthinking it.

Case in point, he stretched out a legilimency probe and just sort of...wrapped it around one of those could-be-separated-even-if-they-aren't-really-separate currents of energy and teased it apart from the rest, enough to get a hold on it and shape it enough to make it more like _him _than _her_ (though he couldn't say _how_) and _pulled_, as though it was an extension of his own mind that had gotten away from him, dragging it inward, toward the centre of _his_ mind.

Lyra _shrieked_, but Harry barely heard her as she yanked _back_, pulling his probe inside the shell along with the...thought stream thingy he had grabbed, which snapped back into place as soon as he lost his hold on it, trapping him like slamming his arm in a door — it fucking _hurt_! He hissed in pain at the sudden...he didn't even know what to call it, and then things started getting _weird._

On the one hand, he had a line into Lyra's mind, and Lyra's mind was entirely unlike any other mind he'd ever been in before. He couldn't exactly move freely, try to explore her memories or whatever, but he could 'see' (seeing wasn't the right word at all) the way her thoughts moved, all part of a shifting, multi-dimensional shape that made him kind of sick to look at for too long and the _depth_ which was just... Minds were finite, okay, they just _were_. They might have a fuzzy, undefined boundary, but they _did_ stop _somewhere_, and this... It was like standing on the edge of a cliff, staring down and down and when you thought you were looking at the bottom you realised that wasn't the ground, but the sea, and the bottom might as well not exist because it was so far away you'd never see it, lost under the water, and then you realised that it wasn't water, but the blackness of fucking _space_, just, _endless_, but not _empty_ like space, there was _definitely something in there_, he just— He could _feel _it, staring _back_, and—

And then it _spoke_ to him, magic cutting him apart as the meaning drilled its way into his mind, two words: _Get. Out._

_Ah! Lyra?! Lyra, what the fuck— I _can't— _I'm _stuck_! _

And on the _other _hand, well, Lyra _had_ told him she was trying to do some weird mind magic language shite, which Harry was only _just_ realising that Parseltongue was also kind of weird mind magic language shite — it wasn't just the sounds, he'd heard Lyra and Luna say words in Parsel before and it was _missing_ something, some meaning conveyed by magic. Which made sense, because _snakes didn't talk_. They didn't even make that many _sounds_, for God's sake!

When he'd hissed in pain as Lyra's shell clamped down on him like a fucking _bear trap_ (_Goddamnit, Lyra! I'll _get _out, just let me _go_!_) it hadn't been an actual _word_, but it _had_ been conveying that meaning, and since he was already in her fucking head, it was enough like Parsel, he thought, that the weird magical language thing she was trying to do somehow latched onto him, in much the same way she'd grabbed this piece of him and _wasn't letting go_, and sort of started _pulling_ at his understanding of Parsel, and Parsel being what it was, more and more meaning seemed to be drifting over to her, and the more she understood the more the Parsel magic _wanted_ her to understand, and he could _feel _that it was hurting her, throwing this much information at her at once — information he hadn't even really known he _knew_, words he'd never learned, the instinctive _magical_ part of the language that he wouldn't even know how to describe, that he couldn't even consciously _use_ — but he didn't know how to stop it, and he also...didn't think she wanted him to? (He didn't know how he knew that — _any_ of that, if it was mind magic or Parsel, or _what_.)

The voice from the infinite darkness hidden in the depths of Lyra's mind definitely _did_ want him to stop it though. _Oh, for _fuck's _sake_, it...muttered, the sharp, terrible magic all...put-upon and annoyed? _Yes, I'm annoyed, you're in Lyra's mind and Lyra's mind is _mine_, and your magic language thing is getting all mixed up in _her _magic language thing and it _is _hurting her, because she's being _stubborn — _stupid child always _did _have a habit of biting off more than she could chew — and Bella's going to say 'I told you so' because Lyra never learned to use mind magic properly and she doesn't know how to _stop_._

Before Harry could articulate a response beyond _horror_ and _pain _and _what the _FUCK _is _THAT, the space around him, what he had thought was just...the background space of Lyra's mind, basically like ambient magic, something to give other things space to _move_..._shifted_, in a way that was just— That thing, whatever it was, it wasn't just in the endless pit of..._darkness_, it was _all around him_, it was _touching _him and doing _something_, and—

He snapped back into his own body with a suddenness that gave him a _fantastic_ headache, like hitting the ground after getting knocked off his broom at half-stands by a stray bludger. He was lying on the floor, too, he realised, though not before he realised Lyra was still...holding onto him somehow, her magic tied up with his, sucking Parsel out of him like a fucking psychic vampire or something. Or, copying it out, he guessed, it wasn't like he was _losing_ it, just like ideas and words flashing through the edges of his consciousness so quickly he could hardly pick out any specific one before receding back to...wherever it usually was, somewhere in his unconscious mind or coded into his magic or something (he really had no idea how Parsel worked _at all_).

"_No_," she moaned softly, almost sleepily. "_Non_, arrête! _Almost_ — just..._un peu plus_. Because..._fídia_. _Tantum_...just a little more..." Her words, addressed, he thought, to the impossible, infinite voice in her head, trailed off. She, unlike Harry, was still on the sofa, her knees pulled up to her chest, her face buried in them, hands clamped over her ears as though she could physically stop her head from exploding from having _way_ too much information magically stuffed into it all at once. _He_ felt a little like that, and _he_ already _knew_ it, on some level.

He hauled himself to his feet, trying to decide what to do — this was _way_ beyond his pay-grade. Killing a giant bloody snake, fine. Burning a possessed professor to death? He could do that. But he had no idea what to do when he was watching someone hurt themselves, willfully doing however much damage to their own mind in pursuit of _what_? The ability to talk to snakes? Snakes were bloody terrible conversationalists, talking to them definitely wasn't worth _this _— when he was _helping_ one of his best friends hurt herself just by _existing_.

He was still staring indecisively, wondering if he could just _leave_, if that would stop it, when the connection between them, the one only she had been maintaining anymore, broke off. His head jerked back as though it had been a physical thing tying them together, one he hadn't even noticed until it was gone. She didn't react at all, just sat there with her eyes pressed into her knees. The shell around her mind was completely intact again, not a hint of mind magic coming from her, which he guessed was...how her mind was supposed to be, no matter how _wrong_ it was... And, as his senses turned more fully to the physical world, he realised she was muttering something under her breath. It was so quiet he could barely hear it at all, let alone make out what she was saying.

"Er...Lyra?" he said, extending a tentative hand toward her shoulder. "Are you...alright?"

She groaned. «Yes. Maybe. My head hurts. Turn off the sun,» she demanded.

Harry was halfway through pulling the curtains, blocking out the brilliant orange sunset, when he realised she'd demanded it _in Parsel_. Actual, magical Parsel, not just the sounds. Which just— «What the _fuck_?» (Of course, he was pretty sure it didn't actually come out like that in _words_, but that was _definitely _the meaning of whatever he'd just spat back at her, and if she actually spoke it, _somehow_, she would get that.)

Lyra let her head fall back against the arm of the sofa, her shoulders shaking in silent laughter. After a moment she managed to pull herself together enough to say, "So, I guess Snape was right about me being an omniglot. Pretty sure that's not how that's _supposed_ to go, though, that was...a _lot_."

"No, not that — I mean, yeah, that's _weird_, but freaky mind magic language things being like, ten times more freaky when you combine them is just... I get _that_, but— What the fuck _are _you, really?"

Her response, eyes still closed, tension still slowly easing out of her body as she almost melted into the cushions, was in French.

"I didn't understand that."

"Right, English, sorry. That's what _I _said, though. What do you mean, what am I? Like, explain the omniglot thing?"

"_No_, I _mean_, I was _just_ in your head, Lyra. You can't _possibly _expect me to believe you're really human, not with— That's not what human minds are _like,_ Lyra."

"I don't care if you believe me or not. But being created through bioalchemy doesn't make you not human."

"Being Lestrange's—" ("_Black's._") "—daughter doesn't mean you _are _human, either. Maybe she's not human, too."

"Wha— _Oh_. You mean... Oh, come on, you just went and _talked_ to him? ...Don't think so. Harry, would you believe the voice you were talking to was my imaginary friend?"

"An _imaginary friend_. With its own consciousness. That lives in a hole in the fucking universe at the back of your mind. _No_, I _don't _think I _would_." That last bit might have come out a bit more sarcastic than Harry had intended, but..._honestly_?

She opened her eyes just enough to glare at him before closing them again. "It's not a hole in the universe, it's the _heart _of the universe," she said waspishly. "_Magic Itself_. That ritual I did, the one that turned my mind inside out? That's what I was _trying_ to do. Initiate that connection. It just...had some weird side effects."

That was just... Okay, maybe he hadn't been so far off the mark, then, when he'd guessed back at Yule that she was secretly a god. Because, he was pretty sure that if Magic Itself was talking to you, the only thing you could possibly call it was talking to God, or _a_ god, or whatever. Weirdly human — hadn't it said something about being told _I told you so_? But still a bloody _god_. And it was _living in her head_. It had been annoyed with him because Lyra's mind belonged to _it_, and he was...trespassing.

"Ah... It's not still upset with me, is it? That voice?"

"What? No, she's not really _upset_, she just gets a bit overprotective sometimes when I do things neither of us really understand, and if she _was_ upset, it would be with me, anyway, for telling you to go ahead and legilimise me and not trying to stop you." She paused for a moment before adding, "Also, you weren't the one who told her to piss off because you wanted to learn to talk to snakes. Seriously? It may not be talking to thunderbirds, but «Parseltongue» is _neat_. You let me see the entire bloody universe when I was ten. Doesn't matter if it was my idea, I still don't think you have any right to talk."

"Uh..._huh_." That was just— He didn't even know. _Insane._ The god — goddess, apparently — in her head got _overprotective _sometimes? There were things _Magic Itself _didn't understand? And who just went around telling a goddess to piss off? Or telling them they didn't have a right to do _whatever the fuck they wanted_? _Especially _when just her _voice_, talking to Harry directly, had felt like magic tearing him apart. He didn't think she'd been doing that on purpose, the Voice. Maybe at first, when she was telling him to _get out_, but it was still like that later, when she was grumbling to herself about the impending _I told you so_. He didn't know how Lyra could stand living like that _all the time_.

Not to mention he was still trying to wrap his head around the idea that she had a direct connection to _Magic Itself_ warping the shape of her mind into something _impossible_. Humans simply shouldn't — _couldn't_ — have a bottomless pit leading to _the heart of the Universe_ in the back of their minds, he refused to believe they could. And had she just said something about the goddess showing her _the entire universe_ when she was _ten_? That was, he didn't even know — _impossible _seemed insufficient, somehow. He'd just gotten slightly distracted by remembering that something living in the depths of that infinite nothingness, the very background noise of Lyra's mind, had kind of seemed like it wanted to kill him for breaking into her head.

Also, Parsel apparently had a name? Like, a proper one, in Parsel. How had he not realised that?

Lyra sighed. "I'm supposed to tell you that it's a fantastically bad idea to try possessing someone who's already being possessed by something _much _more powerful than you, and if you try it again, she might eat you."

"_Eat me_? And what do you mean _possessing someone_? I wasn't _possessing_ you, I was just..."

Well, he didn't know _what_ he'd been doing, really, but it wasn't really like when Voldemort possessed Crouch at all. Which he didn't always do, apparently they were concerned that there would be weird transfiguration-y effects from too much direct contact with a thing that _was not supposed to exist in this universe_ — like the face on the back of Quirrell's head (And if that was just a thing that _happened_, being in contact with something that wasn't supposed to be here, how the _fuck_ was Lyra not like...some weird tentacle monster by now, or something? Contact didn't really _get_ much more direct than _that_, and hadn't she done that ritual she'd mentioned a few times now _years_ ago?) — so he was working on...something else, Harry still didn't quite know what, he was trying _not_ to know, even though he _really wanted to know_. But the point was, he _knew_ what it felt like to possess someone, and just that little bit of kind-of compelling wasn't it. Was it?

"Well, you weren't doing it very _well_, but... That's something you should ask Snape about, I don't know shite about mind magic, I think that should be perfectly obvious by now. And she probably won't _actually _eat you, but I'm guessing your head doesn't feel much better than mine at the moment, so, you'd have that to look forward to. I'm not going to just sit here and _let_ you do it again, though, so you'd probably get stunned first."

"Don't worry, I'm not going to sit here and try, that was..." he shuddered slightly.

She giggled. (Harry hadn't noticed before this summer, but laughing at everything seemed to be the Black way of dealing with..._anything_. He was kind of surprised Sirius's animagus form was a dog and not a fucking hyena, and Lyra was every bit as bad.) "Totally worth it. I've been trying to figure out what the Hisses of Annoyance meant for _years_."

"Hisses of Annoyance?"

"Er...basically the sort of shite Snape mutters to himself in class, but in Parsel. You know the sort of thing — «You are less useful than a dead frog too rotten to eat,» «Why am I always the one who has to deal with this juvenile inanity,» «If I have to explain this one more time, I will ask the Queen of Serpents to eat you» ..."

Harry didn't think Snape had ever threatened to set a basilisk on his students, but he had to admit the comparison was...kind of apt.

"Then there's «tie yourself in a knot», which I think is basically the Parsel equivlaent to _go fuck yourself. _«May you never feel warm again,» which is kind of like _go die in a fire_. Um_..._kind of an all-purpose, «I hate everything.» But there's also more specific ones, like, «Star-child, we are _not_ going off on that tangent again, no matter how interesting it is,» and «Stop talking, star-child, before I crush the air out of you to _make_ you stop talking.» Apparently he had a pet name for me. I feel _so_ loved."

Okay, wait. "_Who_ the _fuck_ gave you a nickname in Parsel?" Because the only other Parselmouth Harry could think of off the top of his head was _Riddle_, and that simply _wasn't possible_.

"It's not important, you wouldn't know him."

"God _damn _it, Lyra!" «Stop pretending you don't know what I'm talking about and answer the thrice-cursed question!»

Her lips twitched in a sleepy, half-hearted smirk. "Yeah, I heard that one a couple of times, too. One of my teachers, obviously. You didn't think you were the only «speaker» in Europe did you? I mean, you probably aren't even the only one in _Britain_. Luna's mother was one, at least, and I imagine there are a few common houses out there carrying the trait. And it's almost _common _in some places in India, and there's something similar in the New World, though that...might not be related, I don't know. Nor do I care, at the moment. If you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to pass out, now."

He _did_ mind, actually. «This conversation is not over.»

Lyra didn't respond.

"Lyra?"

Still nothing.

He stalked back over to the sofa — he'd started pacing around the room at some point, hadn't noticed — to glare down at her. "_Lyra_. I was still talking to you!"

But apparently she cared as little about that as she did about the prevalence of Parseltongue in the Americas, because as far as Harry could tell, she was out cold.

«You are clearly not human,» he informed her unconscious body, then turned on his heel and stalked away because, well, she kind of had a point — his head was _pounding_, and sleep sounded like a much more attractive activity right now than _anything_ else.

* * *

_I really feel like I should have something to say here other than 'd'aww, our little Harry is growing up' but...I've got nothing. Maybe I'll write proper notes when we re-organise this clusterfuck of a 'book' — seriously, the document is titled 'Summer Vignettes'! It was supposed to be just a few short bits and pieces of shite happening over the summer! But no, we can't not write 350 pages of side-plot BS... There's still five more of them to post. *headdesk* (This is why I will never be a real author. Original fiction publishers would never let me get away with this sort of thing.)_

_—Leigha_


	27. Half-Seen Things

_So I think if I just..._ Lyra reached into the Dark, as though she were going to shape a bit of it into a pocket, but instead of pinching and folding a bit of that dimension in on itself, she sort of...folded it around herself. Not actually stepping _out_ of the Mundane Plane, just...tweaking the boundary between the planes to hide herself, kind of the exact _opposite_ of shadow-walking, really.

_Er..._

_What?_

Before Eris could answer, the resistance which had been fighting against her latest attempt to figure out the goddess's fun little obscurity trick suddenly _snapped_. (_That._) There was a sickening _jolt_ before things stabilised, though she still felt slightly...off, so...

_Did it work?_

_No? Maybe? I don't know, you look the same to me,_ Eris said. Which was about as useful as everything she'd had to say on the subject — not that she hadn't been willing to advise Lyra in her explorations of shadow magic, she just didn't experience the various planes of existence in the same way, so her advice wasn't terribly _helpful_.

_Fine, I'll go ask..._whoever she happened to run into first, probably. Assuming they could see her. If they couldn't, that would be its own sort of answer, wouldn't it.

It took all of two seconds to realise that, no, it hadn't worked, and in fact she'd done something _very wrong_, because she stepped into the doorway between the sitting room and the dining room at the same moment Sirius did, obliviously throwing a comment over his shoulder rather than looking where he was going.

If he'd just tripped over her, that would be one thing. But he _didn't_. He walked straight _through _her, turning to look where he was going right around the time she yelped in surprise, trying to scramble out of his way. He screamed like a cursed banshee and scrabbled back against the wall as he realised that he'd just somehow managed to walk through her as though she was a ghost. Which both suggested that she was still visible, and also that she was intangible, which was _not_ what she'd been going for, _at all_.

"Fuck. Guess _that_ wasn't it." She sighed, rolling her eyes and taking a seat on the nearest chair. Gingerly — if Sirius could walk through her, she was pretty sure she could fall through furniture. She didn't, though it didn't feel entirely like she was actually _sitting_ so much as...well, it was _kind of_ like floating in a tepidarium...in a way that was entirely unlike that, really. Mostly it just felt _weird_.

"Bella? What the— MIRA!"

"What the fuck is your problem? I'm pretty sure I didn't do anything to you." _Pretty _sure because, well, she didn't really _know_ what it would do, walking through an intangible shadow-person, but walking through ghosts didn't hurt anyone, and _she_ felt fine.

"What is it?" Zee said, making an entrance from the direction of the nearest loo.

"It's— She's— _This!_" he stuttered, edging close enough to wave a hand through her arm.

She swatted at him, completely ineffectively. "Knock it off, arsehole."

"Is it some kind of illusion?" Zee asked, coming closer.

"No, I'm not a fucking _illusion_," Lyra snapped.

"I...don't think so?" Sirius said, poking at her arm again. "It doesn't _feel _like an illusion, there's like...kind of drag?"

"You— You can't hear me, can you? _Fuck_," she muttered, standing again to get away from his poking. Come to think of it, she didn't really think she was properly hearing _them_, either. She'd been _interpreting_ it as hearing, but in the same way as she _heard_ Eris talking to her, or the magic part of Parsel. It wasn't _really _hearing, it was magic, but 'hearing' was the closest equivalent non-magical, human sense. No, it was _really_ more like...sensing someone from the Shadows, just...much clearer. More detailed than it would be if she was actually _in_ Shadows. Which suggested...

_Yes, I think you're right_, Eris confirmed, in response to her not-quite-articulated idea.

_Well how do I get back?_ Because _between planes_ seemed like a _fantastically _bad place to just...hang around, and... An experimental attempt to step out of the Shadows did nothing. ...And she couldn't properly step _into _them, either. Bugger!

_How the fuck should I know?_

_«You are less useful than a dead frog too rotted to eat.»_

She pulled her wand, casting an illusion. "Can you hear me now?" They could both of their heads snapped around to stare at her, rather than muttering amongst themselves trying to figure out what she was. Fabulous. "I'm not an illusion, I was trying to do something with shadow magic, and I fucked it up."

Sirius and Zee exchanged another _look_, a hand rising to Zee's temple as though struck by a sudden headache. Sirius seemed to be trying not to laugh at her. After a moment of her silently glaring at him, he stopped trying.

"Oh, go on, laugh it up. Not like this is a serious problem, or anything, I'm just fucking _intangible_!"

"What the fuck else am I supposed to do? This doesn't seem like a _Sirius_ problem at all." The complete arse sniggered at his own stupid pun. "Let me know if there's anything I can do to help, but in the meanwhile, I'll be at the beach."

He sauntered off, calling for Harry and Blaise, presumably to see if they wanted to go to with him, leaving a very intangible Lyra with a very confused Zee, staring at each other with nothing to say. Because what the hell _was_ there to say?

"Well, don't look at _me_," she said, rather defensively. "You're the one who knows how magic works, and I have to be at the Ministry in twenty minutes, so, best of luck sorting out this little...snafu." And with that, she followed Sirius down the hall, shaking her head in silent disbelief.

Well... She hadn't actually expected either of them to have anything useful to offer, but.

_Fuck._

§

_Bella says she's never heard of anything like this, asks if you've tried apparating out._

_Of course I've tried apparating out! It's been two days, does she really think I didn't think of that?!_

_No, she doesn't. _

_Does she know anyone who might actually know anything about this shite? Shadow magic, I mean?_

_No one anywhere near you. Angélos, of course, but we don't trust Angélos to actually _help _you._

_Yeah...okay...but you _will _ask her, if we can't think of anything else?_

_Well..._yes_, but...you don't feel hungry or tired or anything, and your future doesn't feel like you're actually in _danger_, so..._

_So you're not going to ask her. Right. Fuck you, Eris._

§

"Er...Lyra?"

"What?" she asked, poking her wand at the book in front of her to turn the page. Harry flinched slightly, as though he thought she was going to hex him or something. Which, yes, she _was_ vaguely annoyed with _everything_ at the moment, if she thought hexing him would help she certainly would. But somehow it didn't seem likely, so.

This was fucking useless. No one else in the entire history of the Family seemed to have managed to fuck up shadow magic _quite_ this badly, she hadn't been able to find a single reference to anything like her situation in _any _of the journals or treatises she'd poured over in the past three days, and no one besides Lyra herself seemed to be taking the problem very seriously. It didn't help that Eris was being stubborn about asking Angel for help — even though she was practically the only person she or Bella could think of who _might_ know how to fix this, or know someone who knew how to fix it (so Lyra wasn't speaking to her at the moment). Bella had already asked some vampires associated with the Anti-Statutarians she'd been talking to, and they'd never even _heard _of someone getting _stuck_ halfway between the Dark and the Mundane. They apparently hadn't thought it was _possible_, which just—

Okay, doing the impossible when it was something _neat_, yes, she was totally on board with that. Doing the impossible when it was boring and annoying, and made her bloody _intangible_, was a pain in the arse!

Yes, she'd managed to establish by this point that she apparently didn't need to sleep or eat or use the loo while she was like this, and she _could_ still do magic, so she wasn't _quite_ as fucked as she might otherwise be, but that didn't mean this didn't suck _balls_. She _could_ walk through walls if she wanted, but not wards or anything enchanted, including the furniture, which raised questions about how the hell her wand was with her and still worked, stuck as she was mostly outside of her dimension. She had _no_ answers to these, which was itself somewhat infuriating. And she'd been stuck wearing the same clothes for _days_, which... Well, she didn't really _need_ to change them, but she kind of felt as though she should, if only because looking exactly the same for days on end was _boring._ And had she mentioned that not being able to touch anything was _fucking annoying_?

Case in point: "Ah, Hermione's sent you a letter."

"Be a love and open it for me, Harry," she said, trying her level best not to snap at him. She might have overcompensated, because he seemed even more wary of her than he had when she'd been short with him a moment ago.

He did, his eyes skimming over the text.

"Well? Can I _see _it?" Not that she particularly minded Harry reading her post — if he found out that she was actually a dimension-hopper or that he had briefly been dead that would still be the least of her problems at the moment, and he knew practically everything else by now.

"Er, yeah, sorry." He laid it on the desk for her.

Mostly questions about the theory treatise, she saw, skimming it herself. Hardly anything urgent. Reiterating her doubts about the vassalage agreement (which Lyra honestly could not comprehend, even when she wasn't completely distracted by being intangible) and introducing her mother to Cissy, which Narcissa had already written her about, putting it off until after Sirius's trial concluded, and in any case was not going to happen until Lyra figured out how to get fully back into the right bloody dimension (or just a _single_ one) — she _definitely_ wasn't going to go through a Portal like _this_, she could only _imagine _the potential consequences, and none of them were at _all _pleasant — so also not urgent. That _last _bit, however...

"Come on," she snapped at Harry, dropping her attempt to sound reassuring and not like she might hex anyone who looked at her wrong, because she very well _might_, if anything _else_ cropped up to make this situation more frustrating. "Where's Blaise? I need to make a phone call."

§

"Granger residence, this is Emma speaking."

"Er...Zabinis' California flat, Lyra speaking?"

"Lyra, you really don't— She's just letting you know you got the right number."

"Oh. Well, that's...a bit odd, isn't it? I mean, I doubt Hermione would've given me the wrong number. She was kind of surprised that I asked for it, but—"

"Lyra, dear? Who else is there? Am I on speaker? It sounds like you're underwater or something."

"Yes, you are, Doctor Granger. This is Blaise Zabini. Harry's here as well."

"Er... Hi, Missus Doctor Granger."

"Oh, call me Emma, boys."

"May we speak to Maïa, Emma?"

"Of course, just give me a minute— (_Hermione!_ Here, dear, it's for you.)"

"Hello? Who—?"

"Maïa?"

"Lyra?"

"Yes, and Blaise, and Harry."

"Er...hi?"

"Yes, hello, whatever. So, I just got your letter, and since I can't really write back at the moment—"

"Sorry, Lyra? I think there's something wrong with the connection, you sound really weird."

"It's because I'm using a sound illusion to talk, it's bloody annoying, but—"

"Er... Why are you—"

"It's not important. I was just calling to let you know that I can't write back at the moment, and I also can't go on a date with you. I'm...indisposed."

"You're— Lyra, if you didn't want to go out with me, you could have said so—"

"It's not that I don't _want_ to go out with you — I'm not sure exactly what to do or how that whole...dating _thing_ goes, but that's fine, whatever — I _can't_."

"Well, why _not_? Are you busy, or? It doesn't have to be this Saturday, I don't really have plans until we go back to school."

"Ah...no, not busy. There's just... As I said, I'm indisposed. Indefinitely."

"Lyra. What the _hell_ is that supposed to mean?"

"She's intangible, and doesn't know how to fix it."

"Blaise! You're still— Oh, my God. Just— Okay, what the hell do you mean _you're intangible and don't know how to fix it_?"

"Er...that's pretty much it."

"Right. Fine, then. Just, forget it."

"Wait, what?"

"If you don't want to go out with me, that's _fine_, I just— Forget it."

"I don't _not_ want to go out with you, I'm stuck in bloody California because while, yes, I would enjoy seeing you, I wouldn't enjoy it enough to risk using a Portal while I'm stuck between dimensions!"

"Wait, you're really— Jesus, Lyra, what did you _do_?! How did you— Are you okay?! And I didn't _believe _you — I'm the _worst _girlfriend, I—"

"Yes, I'm really intangible, fucked up a shadow magic trick I was trying to figure out and er, I'm not sure? I mean, if I knew what I'd done, really, I'd've fixed it _days _ago. I'm _fine_, I'm just _stuck_, so I'm going to have to say no to the whole date thing, and I'm fairly certain that makes me the worse girlfriend out of the two of us, and _please_ stop freaking out because I have _no_ patience for that sort of dragonshite today."

"_Days_?! I— How— Why are you only telling me _now_? Are you _okay_? You sound—"

"Oh, come on, even I know it's rude to refuse to respond to an invitation, and I can't write back to you because I can't hold a bloody quill — I'm _good _at levitation charms, but not like, _levitate the fucking ink into the shape of words_ good! But yes, I'm fine. Intangible. But otherwise, fine."

"You can't be _fine_, Lyra, how are you— Are you _eating_? Or– or you're going to die of dehydration or something, you can't just _become intangible, Lyra!_"

"Well it's not like I did it on purpose, and no, I'm not eating, and I'm apparently not going to die of dehydration, either, it's already been four days — and before you ask, no, I haven't slept, I don't seem to have any bodily needs at all at the moment, which I suppose makes sense because I _haven't got a physical body_ at the moment, or it's temporarily outside of time or something. It's actually kind of neat, theoretically. Just generally really boring in actuality. And frustrating. _Very _frustrating."

"But– but— It's been _four days_?! _Damn _it, Lyra, when— Were you going to tell me about this at all?"

"Er...no? Well, maybe after I figured out how to reverse it. I guess it might have come up eventually."

"Lyra!"

"Fuck, was that one of the questions where I was supposed to lie?"

"_What_? No! Why would you— Why _wouldn't _you tell me? I– I..."

"Why _would _I tell you? It has nothing to do with you, I don't _like _admitting I've fucked up, and you have nothing useful to contribute to solving the problem."

"_Urgh_, you— You didn't think I might want to know that my– that you made yourself fucking _intangible_?"

"Wow, you got Granger to say _fuck_?"

"Oh, suck it, Blaise, if I don't have patience for Maïa today, do you really think I have patience for _you_? And even if I _had_ thought of it, what would be the point? I'll let you know when I've got it sorted. Er...what's the phrase, again?"

"Rain-check."

"Right, yes, rain-check, on the date, Maïa. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to trying to figure out why I'm currently stuck between planes and how to fix it."

"But— Ooh, _fine, _just...be careful, Lyra. Blaise, Harry, you'll keep an eye on her, won't you?"

"Wha— Yeah, of course we will, Hermione."

"Don't worry, Maïa, she'll figure it out."

"Besides, what could possibly _happen _to me? I'm _intangible_. It's not like I can get _hurt_."

§

_Okay, look, Eris. We've established that this is a completely unique fuck up as far as the literature is concerned, I can only interact with the Mundane Plane using magic, the only magic cast from the Mundane Plane that appears to affect me is transfiguration, and then only irregularly, which suggests I'm stuck mostly outside of it, as though we didn't already know that. It's been five days, now, and we're getting nowhere. Ask Angel if she's willing to help us. _Please_._

Eris's uncertainty was nearly palpable in this state, warring with her unease with the intangibility situation. She had been relatively unconcerned at first, but this morning she'd begun to become increasingly agitated, refused to tell Lyra why. Which probably _wasn't good_.

_Fine. _

_Fine?_

_Yes, I'll do it. The Dark says she'll— Oh, never mind._

Angel stepped out of the Shadows, peering closely at Lyra's intangible form. "Oh, well, this is..." She poked Lyra in the shoulder without even a greeting, dragging her fingers through her not-flesh as though examining its texture.

"...Hello, Auntie Angélos," Lyra said, not entirely certain how she ought to be addressing her many-times-great aunt, but hardly concerned about the formalities, under the circumstances. Or ever, if it came down to it, just, usually there were other people around who _did_ care about that shite.

Angel wasn't one of them, apparently. (Somehow, Lyra wasn't surprised.) "Hi! So...this is weird." She stepped back into the Dark, Lyra could _feel _her there — she hadn't really been very aware, most of the past few days, of what she was perceiving in the Dark, because for the most part there was very little there. "You _can _hear me from here, right?"

"Er...yes?" In the same way she always 'heard' things from the Shadows, but that was just par for the course lately. "Why wouldn't I...?" Oh. Apparently she could talk, here, too. Good to know, she supposed.

"You wouldn't _believe_ how incompetent and ill-suited most human shadow-walkers are to this plane. But then, you're not entirely human anymore, are you?"

"Ah...what? Are you talking about Eris?"

"_Nooo..._that's a different not-entirely-human thing. _This_ is about you becoming shadow-kin."

"Shadow-kin?" Lyra repeated. She was certain she'd never heard that particular term before.

_The thing you did with the Essence of Shadows_, Eris told her_. Subsuming it changed you. _

Well, _yeah_, she'd known that. Even if the weird shadow-vision thing and the sunlight suddenly being _terrible_ hadn't given it away, she _had_ felt it in her, doing _something_, making her a dark creature physically, not just _meta_physically. But..._That wore off, though, weeks ago._

"Subsuming Darkness— You _do _know what that _means_, don't you?" Angel said. "I mean, we knew you were reinventing the wheel, but subsumation, in general, how would you describe it? The basic principle, I mean."

"Well...kind of like freeform alchemy? I mean...stripping out the elements and properties you want from something and integrating them into yourself — that's basically an alchemical process, isn't it?" That was the impression she'd gotten from Professor Riddle's ramble on the subject, and it _did_ seem to fit with her experience of it...

"Interesting way to think of it, and not entirely wrong — that _is_ the basic premise behind the Elixir of Life — but not what I was getting at. How do you _integrate_ the energies or qualities you subsume? You _alter your own fundamental identity_. Technically what you did, turning a human into shadow-kin, is a kind of metamorphosis — not metaphagy, which is what most people think of when they think of subsumation, but it's the same concept. You just altered your own fundamental identity to define yourself as having certain non-human qualities, rather than to take advantage of energies humans simply _can't_. Though I suppose one of those non-human qualities might _be_ some form of esoteric subsistence. I imagine that particular side-effect would vary by case, though, since it's not really the _point_ of the exercise... _Hmm_, I should look into that. Ask around, at least. One of the Tams probably knows. Anyway, normally there's formal ritual involved in metamorphoses this complex, but auto-metamorphosis isn't by any means unheard of. Getting us to bless the Distilled Darkness before you took it into yourself... I'll admit that was a new one to me, probably helped speed the process along, I think, but that doesn't really matter."

Lyra wasn't sure _any_ of that really mattered. Yes, it was _fascinating_ — she'd never even _heard_ of metamorphosis, at least not in any context that suggested it might have anything to do with her attempt to cheat at shadow magic — but it didn't really address her current _problem_. Namely, somehow getting stuck between planes like a complete _idiot_. "So, you know what I did, then?"

"Well, obviously? I mean, is it _not_ obvious? Your presence in the Mundane Plane is wraith-like at best — you don't _really _belong there any more than I do, anymore. But you don't _not_ belong there, it _is _your native plane, still, so it's not trying to push you out, you don't have to _cling_ to it like an actual wraith, you're...buoyant. Sitting right on the boundary between the planes, like floating on the sea. Not quite sure how you managed to lose your way _halfway through_ the boundary, but you sort of settled there and since that's pretty much where you belong now, half-human, half-shadow creature — or, well, more than half, really, you _are_ tangible on this side, you know—" She poked Lyra in the arm to demonstrate, which _no_, she _hadn't _known that, because there wasn't really anything for her to try to _touch_ on this side of things. "—but that's hardly the point. Getting all the way to either plane from where you are now is like leaving your own — far more difficult than moving from one plane where you don't quite belong to another when you're already in a constant state of liminality."

"Er...right. So...does this mean I can't shadow-walk anymore? I mean, when I figure out how to get...out? Er...in? Whatever." Because if this was going to be a recurring problem, Lyra was going to be livid.

"No? As long as you don't go straddling the boundary at least, I think it should be fine."

"Oh. Well, how do I get out of here, then? All the way to one or the other, I mean, so I can jump back."

Angel shrugged, the motion sending waves rippling through the Dark, as clear as speaking. "No idea. I don't know anyone else who's ever done this. It's fairly obvious what the problem _is_, but... Actually, no, I do have an idea. Have you tried getting someone to cast a Patronus at you?"

"Er...no?" She could, though. Might be kind of embarrassing asking Harry to save her, but at least she knew someone who could _cast _the damn thing. She didn't think she had, in her old universe. "Would that actually work?"

"It might. Dragging vampires out of the Shadows is what the spell was designed to do in the first place. Of course, it might also kill you. Or it might not do anything at all."

Well, knowing exactly what she was dealing with was..._something_, Lyra supposed. Because, no, that _hadn't_ been obvious. But as far as potential solutions went, that sounded a bit...wanting. What with the whole _potentially dying_ bit. "Any idea what the arithmancy is on that? Probability of dying, I mean."

Angel shrugged again. "I don't know any other shadow-kin who've had it used on them. Direct contact with light battle magic like that burns most dark creatures like sunlight." Lyra winced. She could walk around in the sun just fine (or, well, with not with _much_ more damage than she had before doing that ritual — she'd _always_ been prone to sunburns) and she hadn't had burns from the light repelling charm Lavender had used on her at the end of term, but compared to a Patronus, that was _nothing_. "You're more human than me, obviously. So it might not burn you as badly. But on the other hand, you are just a baby, really, so I don't know how well you'd be able to resist it."

If Lyra hadn't been so distracted by the _more human than me_ comment, which had reminded her of the last time Angel had visited and the insinuation that they were the same sort of thing, she might have been more annoyed about the _just a baby_ bit. As it was, the implication seemed to be that she was still in the process of becoming...whatever Angel was. Maybe. Unless she just meant that _everyone_ looked like a baby when you were five-hundred years old and were in constant contact with the Primordial fucking Dark. The Dark probably considered _Eris_ a child in comparison to itself. "Er... Right. Thanks, but I _think _I'll hold off trying that, then."

Another shrug rippled to her through the Shadows. "It was nothing. Especially since we _are_ family, duty to one's blood and all that."

Even despite the circumstances, it still gave Lyra a bit of a thrill, being recognised as family by _Angel fucking Black_. She always _had_ been Bella's favorite character in the legends of the early post-Covenant Blacks. (She was pretty sure they'd been intended as more cautionary tales, really, but that had backfired spectacularly, at least in her case.) Though it _was_ a bit amusing to think that family would mean much of anything to _Angel_. After all, "Didn't you kill most of your family?"

"Only the boring ones. You're lucky you were born before the Covenant was broken, or I'd've killed the rest of them, too. These last few centuries the whole fucking House got boring. But Bellatrix Druella took care of that for me, and you have _potential_, and _breaking_ the Covenant because _fuck_ the House of Black is just so ironically in character for a proper Lord Black that I'm actually looking forward to seeing what Sirius Orion does with the position, betrayal of the Dark notwithstanding. So, I'll see you in a couple of months. I expect to see you representing the House in the Tournament come Samhain, so do sort out this whole wraith issue, would you."

As though she had any more idea how to do that than she'd had _before_ Angel showed up. "Ah...right. Yes. I'll do that. Not because being stuck between planes is bloody stupid and being intangible sucks, but so I can enter the fucking Triwizard Tournament." Not that she hadn't already been planning on entering the Tournament, but _honestly_.

"Cheers. And let me know if you try the Patronus thing. There aren't exactly enough shadow-kin around to do a proper experiment on our reactions to light battle magic, but a case-study would be _something_ at least." And then she vanished, as abruptly as she'd arrived, well before Lyra could think of anything to say in response other than _sure, if I don't _die_, at least_.

§

"Okay, Bella," Sirius said, practically _skipping_ into her room and conjuring an armchair beside her desk, just to jump on it, sitting on an armrest with his feet on the seat (because Sirius was _almost_ as bad at chairs as Lyra herself) and generally looking all too pleased with himself. "How much longer are you going to be like this?"

Lyra, who had only become more annoyed with her predicament as the days wore on, glared at him. "Well I suppose that depends if I get to the point that I'm actually _dying _of boredom and therefore ask Harry to cast a thrice-cursed Patronus Charm at me, because so far I've got nothing. _Why_?"

He grinned, brandishing a letter. "From Amy! I've been cleared! Completely exonerated, including for the illegal animagus thing, chalk that up to time served. There's going to be an emergency session tomorrow to get all the recognition dragonshite out of the way, tender the official apologies of the Administration, blah, blah, blah, but! The World Cup is next week!"

"...Yes, and?" She had no idea what those two things had to do with each other. Nor, if pressed, did she really _care_.

"_And_, how much you wanna bet that I can parley the Minister's apology into seats in the top box?"

"Yeah...no bet. You could probably get top box seats just showing up the day of. Even if you hadn't been locked up without a trial for twelve years, you'd still be the fucking Lord of a Most Ancient House," she pointed out. And it wasn't like it was that difficult to expand a room for twenty-four hours, throw a few more seats in at the last minute. If whoever designed the stadium had half a brain, they'd've kept the wards and structural enchantments simple enough to deal with emergency alterations like that, no problem.

He pouted at her. "You're no fun when you're like this."

A flick of his wand sent a conjured paper airplane whizzing toward her head. She dodged it. She'd let one hit her, once, just to see what happened. It had lost enough momentum that it sort of got stuck by the time it passed halfway through her arm. And then he'd refused to grab it for her, and she couldn't quite get a grip on it herself, so she'd eventually had to resort to walking through a wall to get rid of it. "Fuck you, Sirius."

He smirked. "Sorry, not into necrophilia. Er...fantasma-philia? Whatever. Not my thing."

Well, she _had_ walked into that one, hadn't she. Still, she could hardly stop herself pointing out, "I'm not a fucking _ghost_."

"You're also barely tangible, what would even be the point?"

"Good question, Sirius: what is the point?"

"Oh, you know, I heard somewhere that orgasms are fun, so..."

Okay, Lyra had to fight not to laugh at that one. Sirius _could_ be very entertaining when he wanted to be. "And I stand by that assessment, but why are you here?"

"Besides annoying you?"

"_Yes_."

"Are you going to get this sorted out by next weekend? Because if not, I'm not going to bother getting you a seat."

"What, at the World Cup?"

"No, genius, on a city tour. Of _course_ at the Cup, what the fuck have I been talking about?"

Well...sex, mostly? It had taken all of half a week living together to realise that Sirius was a bigger flirt than _Zee_. He was by far the more likely of the two to say that sort of shite to her in this timeline. It was kind of weird, actually, because this Zee certainly didn't have a problem flirting with anyone _else_, and Lyra was _pretty sure_ she'd caught Zee actively _stopping _herself from saying something a few times (though she could hardly guess what she'd been going to say). Not that she minded, she had just kind of thought that was how Zee communicated with _everyone_, all soft and teasing, still didn't get why she'd stopped. (People were confusing. Even Zee, sometimes.)

Honestly, Lyra had never really considered going to the World Cup. Quidditch was kind of boring even when she _didn't_ already know how the match was going to end, and she'd done the arithmancy for the OWL, so. The most interesting part would probably be wandering around meeting foreign mages.

_We should go_, Eris urged her_. It will be _fun_._

_Assuming I _can _go..._

Lyra sighed. "Eh, go ahead and get me a seat. If it turns out I can't go, we can give it to Dora or something. She probably likes Quidditch more than I do, anyway."

"Wait, Dora? Andi said she's on some kind of undercover mission. How would we even get a letter to her?"

Oh, right. Sirius didn't know about that. No reason he shouldn't, though, being the proper Head of the House, and all. "Er, no, she and Moody are trying to kill Bella. It's not like she couldn't take a day or two off. And they're in Florence, or they were before I got stuck, I haven't been able to spy on them since, obviously." Not that she'd spent _much_ time spying on them, detectives were kind of boring. Especially when they were _detecting_ and not practicing dueling or something. "I'm pretty sure the Hunters could get a letter to them if you asked nicely."

"They're... You know what, I don't even care that you've apparently been _spying _on fucking Mad-Eye—"

"The Eye is limited to the Mundane Plane, it's fine."

"Whatever, you didn't think it was maybe worth telling Andromeda that her fucking sister's going to kill her daughter?!"

"Oh, relax, Bella's not going to kill Dora. Snape asked her not to. And also, Dora's great." The latter point was probably far more pertinent than the former, honestly. It was really much more like Snape was on Bella's list because of Dora's interest in him, rather than the other way around.

"What in the nine fucking hells do you mean Snivels asked Bella not to kill Dora? _Why_? And how do you even _know _that?"

Lyra gave him her best _are you stupid?_ look. "Apparently they're shagging. Snape and Dora. Not Snape and Bella, that would be weird." Though she _could_ make him _very _uncomfortable making step-father jokes all next year, if they were. Or she could just do it anyway, make him uncomfortable _and _confused. "And technically, he asked me to ask her because he's not in contact with her."

"And you are."

That wasn't a question. "I'm sure you're shocked."

"Well, you _are _the same person, so no. Not even a little bit. Where is she?"

For a brief moment, Lyra considered just telling him where she'd come from, who she actually was — he _was_ (legally) the Head of the House, now. But it was much more entertaining watching him try to figure it out, being so close to right for all the wrong reasons. Similarly, he probably _did_ have a right to know where Bella was (even if Lena Geise technically owned the Vinyard, now), but he might run off and do something stupid like try to kill her (and get himself killed in the process), and it was more fun to tease him, anyway.

"Oh, shut up, Bella's _way _more tangible than I am. And that would be telling."

§

Lyra woke suddenly, gasping for air, reaching instinctively for her wand, though the motion dragged at her skin, wrenching painfully at flesh she knew (even before opening her eyes or remembering exactly what had happened) had to be new. She'd had her skin melted off enough times over the past year, she was _far_ more familiar with the feeling of recently having had it regrown than she might have wished.

_Did I blow myself up again?_

_Ah, no, _Eris informed her.

Not entirely necessary, since Harry, as soon as she'd moved, started babbling at her, variations on "Oh, my God, I'm sorry, I didn't— I just— I thought you were going to _die_!"

Pretty effective way to jog her memory.

"So did I," she croaked, her voice sounding like she hadn't spoken in days. Which she supposed she hadn't, really.

She should have known that there would be worse consequences to being stuck between planes than just being intangible, though that had been bad enough on its own. She was actually kind of surprised, now, that nothing worse had happened at any point in the past...week or so? She cast a time-and-date charm to check — looked like she'd been out for about a day — and was immediately distracted by how _good_ it felt, channelling that little pulse of magic. Like a cool sip of water when she was absolutely _parched_. Speaking of which... She conjured a glass for herself, filled it with a condensing charm, almost shivering as the magic flowed through her, dark and soothing, easing a pain she hadn't entirely recognised or distinguished from the _physical_ pain of her still-healing burns until it began to fade.

_Hey Eris? If I ever think it seems like a good idea to tangle with a Patronus in the Shadows, again, kindly remind me of this moment._

_Somehow, I hardly think you're likely to forget_, the goddess thought back, her dry tone not quite masking her concern and anxiety.

It struck Lyra, not for the first time, as rather amusing that Eris was more human in her reactions, sometimes, than Lyra herself. _She_ felt tired, physically, and she was definitely in multiple kinds of pain, but under that, there was only triumph, satisfaction — she was _drinking water_, she was back in her proper plane again, no matter how much it had hurt to get here, and she _wasn't_ dead, so. She definitely didn't want to do this _again_, but it hadn't gone _nearly _as badly as it could have, there was no call for Eris to be all worried about her.

"Are you okay?" Harry asked. "I mean, not _okay_, obviously you're not okay, but the healer Blaise sent for had never seen anything like this — he said the only thing he could do was treat the physical effects, and even then, his spells weren't working, or, well, they obviously _worked_, but not like he thought they should, I guess? It's— Sirius said you'd be fine, but... I'm sorry!" he said again. "I didn't mean to...to..._this_! I didn't want to hurt you, I just— I'm sorry!"

It took a moment for her to register that he was probably expecting an answer of some sort. She was rather more interested in wrapping herself in dark magic, neutralising the lingering poison of the light construct that had overwhelmed her, dragging her back to this plane. But he _had_ saved her life, she probably did owe him _some_ reassurance, at least. "Don't worry about it, Harry."

"But I put you in hospital!"

In point of fact, he hadn't, this was her bedroom in California, infinitely preferable to some hospital ward. "I'd much rather be here than eaten by a fucking lethifold, and Sirius was right, I'll be fine, so. Thank you."

"You shouldn't be thanking me," the silly boy muttered. "I just— I just saw that _thing_ attacking you, and I panicked."

Yes, they'd been sitting around talking about nothing much in particular, she and Harry and Blaise — lucky, really, she'd've been researching her condition alone if Sirius and Mira hadn't gone to Britain for the Emergency Session to Apologise to Sirius because Everyone in Government are Idiots. Harry had been invited as well, and obviously if she'd been able to she could've shown up, but since she _couldn't_ and if Harry went he'd undoubtedly realise he was 'dead' (and Dumbledore probably wouldn't let him leave again), she'd convinced him and Blaise to stay and keep her company. Which excuse really only worked if she _didn't_ hide herself away in her room with a pile of books. Not that it had been _terribly _onerous, it wasn't as though she'd been getting anywhere with her research, anyway.

The lethifold had come out of nowhere. Or rather, she'd felt it coming, following the same path Angel had walked to reach her the other day, she just...hadn't had any idea how to avoid it. Honestly, she hadn't really thought she'd needed to. She'd seen them before, they were one of the half-visible things that had kept flitting around the corners of her vision before the Distilled Darkness had worn off (or before she thought it had, before she'd finished processing it, whatever). At first she'd been a bit wary of them, but they, and all the other creatures that inhabited the Dark Plane, had ignored her entirely, as long as she'd just been watching them from the Mundane Plane or herself flitting through the Dark on her way to somewhere else. She hadn't seen many around since they'd come here, none at all since she'd managed to get stuck all intangible, but that wasn't entirely surprising, either. She wasn't sure _why_, since it wasn't as though they had much of an impact on the Shadows, but shadow creatures seemed to avoid places with too many humans. There were hardly any in London, either.

So she hadn't even really considered the thing a threat until it came right up to her, nosing around her like a curious puppy (if something as formless as a lethifold could be said to _nose_), and she'd tried to wave it off, and something about her reaction had apparently convinced it that she was both potential food and an easy target.

It had wrapped itself around her, a living shroud cutting her off from _both_ planes — lethifolds were one of the dark creatures which could more easily cross the boundary into the Mundane, they were known to hunt sleeping humans (mostly in tropical areas, where there was no need to keep a fire inside at night) — forming a sort of _cocoon _around her. She was pretty sure the 'burns' covering her body too uniformly to be heat-based were the effect of whatever it had been doing, trying to digest her. Her soul hurt in the same way it had when she'd stupidly accepted Flitwick's challenge to cast the Cheering Charm, except _more_, by about an order of magnitude or two, but she'd never been _physically _hurt by light magic, even when Dora was using it to beat the shite out of her over Easter.

"What happened?" she asked, in an effort to distract Harry from his entirely pointless attempts to continue apologising, which was just annoying, she'd already said he had nothing to apologise _for_.

"Ah, we were talking about the World Cup, and this shadow kind of _grabbed_ you out of nowhere. I mean, obviously it wasn't really a shadow, it wasn't even that _dark_ where you were sitting, and we could tell you were trying to get it off yourself, but it kind of...dragged you away, like all the way into...wherever you were stuck, you know?" Right, that would make sense. She'd tried to cast a few different spells at it, break herself free, but she couldn't cast normal spells in the Dark, about the only thing that worked was runic casting, and the lethifold had cut her off from the ambient magic of that plane when it wrapped itself around her. "And you were getting less and less visible— We tried stunning it and a couple of different spells Lupin taught us, but they didn't do anything, and, well..." He trailed off into a rather embarrassed silence before admitting, "I heard you and Sirius talking about how the Patronus might be able to get you back here, if it didn't kill you, and it seemed like that thing—"

"It was a lethifold."

"Yeah, that — it seemed like it was pulling you more into the shadows, and nothing else was working, so..."

"So you figured it was better to _maybe_ kill me to get me all the way back here, rather than definitely let it drag me off wherever it wanted and eat me?"

"Er...yeah, basically." Harry still seemed unaccountably...weird, about that. "I'm sorry," he added, yet again.

"Why?" she asked. Probably too bluntly, but she wasn't really in the mood for normal people guessing games at the moment. "That's what I would have done—" Well, it was what she would have done if she were Harry and could cast a bloody Patronus in the first place, whatever. "—and besides, I didn't die, so it's fine."

If anything, that only seemed to make Harry look more uncomfortable. "I'm not sure how I should feel about that."

"I'm not sure you should feel any way in particular. It's just a fact. Now," she announced, flipping back the sheet that someone had spelled to hover just above her burned skin. It wasn't as bad as she'd feared — certainly not as bad as the acid burns Rowle had given her a couple of months ago, and those had healed in a matter of suspected she'd been conflating the pain from the magical damage (which was fading quickly, now that she could channel dark power to neutralise it) and the physical, because her skin had already started regenerating, turning her a uniform pink. Pretty much all of her was tender and itchy, and there was the familiar ache of having just been through extensive healing, but nothing that would actually keep her in bed. "I'm thinking tacos."

"You're— Lyra! You can't get up, you're—"

"I'm what?" she asked, over his objections. True, she _had_ been burned (or whatever) fairly thoroughly, including, she realised (with some annoyance, as she attempted to stand up) on the bottoms of her feet, but that was what numbing charms were for. _And illusions_, she thought, realising suddenly that her head felt _far_ too light to still have hair on it. Damn it, she _hated_ hair-growth potions.

"You're _hurt_!" Harry snapped. "It was _bad_, Lyra, you—"

"Did I still have eyelids?"

"_What_?"

"Eyelids. Did the thing manage to eat through them before you drove it off?" She doubted it — if it'd managed to get to her eyes, she probably wouldn't be able to see very well at the moment.

"Uh...no?"

She presumed he meant _no, it didn't eat through them_, not _no, you didn't have eyelids_. "Then I'm going to say it was pretty superficial damage." It probably wouldn't even have obliterated all of the scars Bella hadn't gotten rid of. She could still feel the one on her stomach, for example, and the fire-whip burn on her hip. Though it _had_ eaten through the flaying curse marks on her leg, which was a shame, because those had looked _neat_. "Yeah, it's all over, I'm sure it looked _terrible_, but Siri was right. I'm fine, really." A hell of a lot better than she had been fifteen minutes ago, at least, or two days ago. Certainly well enough to go find something to eat.

Harry just stared at her, at that. Not as though he believed her, but at least he wasn't trying to stop her getting dressed, so. "What the fuck even _are_ you?"

She paused halfway through gingerly pulling on a soft muggle shift to look at him, made a futile attempt to guess what he was talking about, but he just looked suspicious, which wasn't any help at all. "Ah...what?"

"You're not human, Lyra. Humans don't– don't get stuck halfway out of the universe or have a bloody _goddess_ living at the back of their minds or just _shrug off_ almost being _eaten_ by some sort of shadow-demon! I asked Hermione, and she says humans _can't _do shadow magic the way you do, and I _know_ you're not a vampire. So what _are_ you?"

Well...that was a hell of a question, wasn't it? Two days ago, before Angel's visit, she'd've said Harry didn't know what he was talking about. That "human" wasn't nearly as small and tidy a category as he seemed to think it was. But, well...Angel had outright said she _wasn't_ human, implied that she wasn't human in _multiple ways_, even. Which was... Well, she was accustomed to thinking of herself as human, wasn't she? She'd been human for the past fourteen years, after all. But Harry _had_ just saved her life, and he _was _basically muggleborn — he probably wouldn't know that having somehow transformed herself into something preternatural was more worthy of a freak-out than her maintaining the increasingly obvious lie that she was, in fact, human. She sighed. "Truth?"

"Yeah, that would be good, for once!"

"My parents— _Bella's_ parents, I mean," she specified (since he thought she was Bella's clone, Dru and Cygnus would still technically be her biological parents), "were human. I was born human. Well, a Black."

"Which _means_?" he interrupted.

She shrugged. It was kind of hard to explain what it meant to be a Black to anyone outside of the House, she'd found. "Like Sirius? It's not really a secret that the whole House is a bit mad. Too much magic in the blood." According to people who weren't Blacks. Obviously there was no such thing as too much magic, really. "Me being a bit...weird, emotionally speaking, not freaking out about shite like almost getting eaten, that's hardly unique. Nor is my connection to magic, to Eris, for that matter. And that's completely unrelated to the shadow magic. Ah, don't tell anyone about any of this, by the way. If you do, I'll have to go on the run and you'll probably never see me again."

"I'm not going to turn you in as a black mage, Lyra." He glared at her, as though insulted that she'd thought he might. Which she hadn't really thought he would _on purpose_, if he knew she was doing something illegal. (Or that she _was_ something illegal in this universe, _so stupid._..) It just wasn't necessarily safe to assume he _would_ know what was legal and what wasn't.

She hadn't even realised he was familiar with the term. Must have asked Blaise or Maïa about Eris after their little mind magic experiment. Well, fine, then. "Good. Maïa might kill you if you set the Aurors on her girlfriend, you know." Speaking of which, she should probably ask her out on a make-up date. Not this weekend, though — if Sirius actually _had_ gotten them tickets to the World Cup, she already had plans.

_He did, you're going to love it._

_But of course telling me why would be _telling_, _Lyra thought back, only slightly sarcastically.

_You like surprises, don't lie_.

Harry just rolled his eyes at that. "And the shadow magic thing?"

"The shadow magic and the getting stuck between planes are because... Well, you were there, when I did that ritual over Yule. I honestly thought it had worn off, but apparently, no, I turned myself into something called shadow-kin. And before you ask, I have _no _idea what that means, I just found out two days ago, haven't really had the opportunity to look into it yet. So if you _must _know, I have no idea what I am. I'll let you know when I figure it out, though I hardly see why it should matter," she noted, moving in front of a mirror to glamour herself less pink and give herself the illusion of hair and eyebrows. That looked...more or less normal, she thought. She didn't really spend all that much time staring at her reflection. "So...tacos?"

"What are you— You can't just go out and get fucking _tacos_, Lyra. You're hurt, in case you didn't notice!"

"I'm fine. Starving, but otherwise fine."

"Look, I'll go get something for you, just, get back in bed. _Please_."

"Are you fucking kidding? I've been stuck in this flat for the better part of a week now, so you can just—"

"Oh, hey, I thought I heard voices," Sirius interrupted poking his head into the room. He was all dressed up in formal robes, must've had something to do as Lord Black today.

"You should get that checked out," she quipped. "Hearing voices, and all."

"Ha bloody ha. I see you're feeling better." He flicked another airplane at her.

She glared at him and swatted it out of the air, prompting a grin. "Much. How was the Everyone in Government are Idiots session?"

"Hilarious. Dumbledore had to make a speech, looked like he was biting into a lemon the entire time." He smirked, then pulled a pinched, puckered face. "Had to go back today to get the offices set up, talked to Andi about drafting a motion to close that fucking loophole they used to keep me locked up all those years, nothing major. Mostly been walking around seeing what's changed for the last few hours. Came back for dinner, though, because nothing's open in Charing at three in the morning."

"Perfect, I haven't eaten in a week. Tacos?"

Sirius hummed consideringly under his breath for half a second — long enough for Harry to open his mouth, but not long enough for him to insist again that she couldn't leave, which, how did he think he was going to stop her, really? "Sure, I found this great little hole in the wall Mexican joint a few blocks from here, they should still be open, I think."

"Really, Sirius? I know you're not, I don't know, the most _responsible_ adult, but—"

"Hey, I resemble that remark!" (Lyra snorted, while Harry just glared at the man.) "But Bella's much more responsible than I am and she knows her limits. If she says she's well enough to go out, she'll be fine."

"And if I'm not, it'll be my own fucking fault, yes." _If you hurt yourself because you don't know your own limits, it's your own fault and you have no right to complain _was one of the principles both Walburga and Ciardha had made a point of drilling into her over the years. Presumably Walburga had done the same for Siri. "Thank you, Sirius. Come on, let's go," Lyra said, linking her arm through his — which, _ow_, she'd forgotten her arm was a bit _soft_ at the moment, and his sleeve was _much_ rougher than it looked — and turning him around, headed back toward the door and actual _food_.

"Wha— _No_, Sirius, she's not _fine_, she's still all burned under that fucking illusion, and who even _knows_ what the Patronus did to her!"

Sirius smirked, waving a hand through her illusory hair, presumably amused by the fact that she'd had to give herself the illusion of hair, then winced at the darkness of it. "Fuck, Bella, overcompensating much?"

No, she was pretty sure she wasn't. Washing herself in the darkest magic she could channel — which, come to think of it, she was almost surprised that Sirius, attuned to the Light as he was, was comfortable standing this close to her — was _perfectly reasonable_ compensation for the lingering effects of the light battle construct. "Aww, poor little light baby get stung by the big bad glamour charm? Please."

He flipped her off.

"Love you too, Siri."

"Sadistic bitch."

"Takes one to know one."

Harry used their little exchange as an opportunity to put himself between the two of them and the door. "Are you even listening to me?"

"Of course we are," Sirius said, probably as a distraction, because she could tell he was trying not to laugh (it was funny because it was true, and even more so because he didn't like to admit it). "She really is fine, though. I mean, yeah, she got a _little _eaten, but you got there in time. She did still have eyelids, so it couldn't have been _that_ bad."

"That's what I told him."

Sirius nodded, looking back to Harry. "Well, there you go, then. Besides, you've been outvoted, so, are you coming with us, or not?"

Harry's fish-slapped look of disbelief shifted from Lyra to Sirius and back again before he sighed in defeat. "You know, I hadn't really noticed before, but you two are basically the same bloody person, and you're both fucking insane."

Lyra grinned, stubbornly refusing to let the expression turn into a pained wince as it stretched the new skin of her face. "That's weird, I thought that was fucking obvious," she quipped, even as Sirius said, "Hey, I'm _way _more sane than Bella!"

"No, you're not," she informed him. He flipped her off again.

"_Ugh_, fine, yes, I guess I'm coming, someone has to keep an eye on you lunatics..."

Sirius flung his other arm around Harry's shoulders, pushed him gently toward the doorway. "Good man, let's go, before she hexes us for making her wait. You know how girls can get when they're hungry and you get between them and food..."

"Oh, shut up, you arse, I've never hexed Harry."

"Has he ever tried to get between you and food before? No? I rest my case."

Lyra tried not to laugh at that, she really did, but Sirius _could _be genuinely amusing on occasion, and weird magical chemical burns or no, her mood had _drastically _improved now that she was no longer stuck between planes.

_So, I take it you _won't _be trying that little experiment again?_ Eris asked.

_Well, at least not until I've had a decent meal, maybe gotten some sleep._ Honestly, she wasn't even planning on attempting normal shadow-walking again before then, just in case.

_I think you misunderstand me, Lyra. You _won't _be trying that little experiment again._

Wow, Eris _never_ gave orders like that. She must have _really _come close to offing herself this time. (Oops.) _Aww, you're no fun. _

_You're incorrigible. _

_And whose fault is _that_?_

(Eris's. It was Eris's.)

* * *

_Poor Hermione, her girlfriend's intangible and doesn't even think to tell her. Also, doesn't realise that asking her to the World Cup would be a pretty awesome make-up date, mostly because Hermione hates quidditch, so why would she want to go? __But on the plus side, Harry got his annual opportunity to be the hero of the story! (Really, it is good for his self-esteem to save Lyra, especially since she normally seems so much more competent than him, and with a skill he worked his arse off to master, too.)_

_And we've finally got Lyra to admit she's not human. Which literally everyone has known since October, but._

_Angel's overestimation of the damage pulling Lyra back to Earth with a Patronus might do is due to the fact that the Dark has prevented her from dying properly so many times now that her own body is more dark magic than flesh and blood. Lyra, on the other hand, is flesh and blood tainted by dark magic, and she doesn't fully realise how much of a difference that makes. While Angel has been around a long time and therefore knows an awful lot about a lot of topics, she's not really an analytical or problem-solving-oriented person, so she's not really the best person to ask about this sort of thing, even if she is the most convenient._

_The "Tams" Angel mentions are alternate versions of Tom Riddle (most are female, thus Tam, rather than Tom) who ended up at Miskatonic and delved into mind magic and subsumation in a way (head)canon!Tom never did. Tam is one of the most terrifying beings on the face of the planet in those timelines, and also Angel's favorite person ever. She's incredibly envious of the alternate versions of herself who get to live in universes with a Tam, especially the ones where Tam manages to become immortal to be her best friend literally forever. (This is very important characterisation for Angel. Totally plot relevant. Not gratuitous in the least.)_

_Shadow creatures avoid big cities because there's too much artificial light there, which disturbs their environment even if the humans themselves aren't really present on their plane._

_IDK, there are probably other things to comment on, but... *shrug* In conclusion, time and tacos heal all wounds, all's well that ends well, and the appropriate response to very nearly getting yourself eaten by a demon is always oops._

_Also, Happy Hallowe'en/Samhain xD —Leigha_


	28. Go the fuck to sleep

Going back to school wasn't usually something Lyra looked forward to. Hogwarts had been, in her home universe, a relatively boring place, compared to doing whatever she wanted with Ciardha all day. Well, not _whatever_ she wanted, but she'd been deciding what she studied for years, now. As long as she was being productive and not causing _too_ much trouble he didn't usually complain. And yes, Zee had been at Hogwarts which had made interacting with their other classmates...marginally bearable, at least, and there were always more things to learn about how normal people thought. But Zee existed _outside_ of Hogwarts as well, and it wasn't as though it had been particularly difficult to convince her parents that it was a great idea to let her run around with Bella and Ciardha, rather than sitting around with them in their normal, boring little house. It would never not be funny that Zee's shockingly normal parents were pretty much the only people she had to _work_ at manipulating, they'd never have let her run around with Bella unsupervised, but Ciardha just _oozed_ respectability, and it had taken less than five minutes for him to decide that having someone else around to entertain Bella would make his job about a thousand times easier, so Zee had spent most of the summer between first and second years with her. Last summer, of course, she'd been focused on the time travel project, but the point was, she hadn't had to go back to school to see _Zee_.

And at school she was actually expected to attend classes and pretend to be...at least _somewhat_ human...though if she'd known there were wilderfolk in the Forest, she might not have minded that so much, being able to take a break now and again was a _lifesaver_. (For everyone around her, obviously.) Plus, while Zee had been at Hogwarts, Meda _hadn't _been, and while Zee was generally more amusing and tended to have more fun ideas and be more...relatable, Meda, like Maïa, could _keep up_. Zee, while cunning and far better than Bella at pretending to be human, wasn't really quick enough to hold up her end of a proper conversation. Though Meda had always liked politics and history and..._people_ things more than magical theory or arithmancy. There had been other trade-offs that were more even, of course. Professor Riddle was around, but Ciardha _wasn't_, and while Riddle was more fun in a dark-magic-nerd, Parseltongue-speaking way (but was under no obligation to humour her much of the time), Ciardha was more fun in a runes and cursebreaking way (and was sort of stuck with her). There were more people around to mess with at school, but they tended to have less potential than the people she ran into outside of school. And of course, Cygnus couldn't get to her at Hogwarts. That was just about the only unqualified _good_ thing about going back to school.

In her old universe.

In _this_ universe, yes, there were still a lot more interesting things going on out in the real world _at the moment_, but there was going to be a Triwizard Tournament this year, which meant that Hogwarts was, for once, going to be the most interesting place to be, starting in November. _Especially _since she'd fixed the panel of judges (_Angelós Black_ was going to be _at Hogwarts_!), and suggested (_ages_ ago, when Zee had asked what she and Blaise thought of the Task ideas they'd been throwing around) that they have _each school_ design three tasks, rather than just have _three total_. She didn't really have any doubt that she _would_ be chosen as the Hogwarts Champion, age requirement be damned, but even if she wasn't, there would still be a break in the regularly scheduled monotony every three weeks or so, and visiting students and professors, and all _sorts_ of opportunities for fun.

Not to mention, everyone was about to get confirmation that Harry wasn't dead (she'd been _so _annoyed when she'd realised he'd known he was 'dead' the whole time, she'd spent all those hours editing the papers Zee had imported over the summer to remove any mention of the scandal surrounding his 'death' for nothing — _well played, boys_), and Dumbledore's freak-out over his disappearance had completely disrupted shite in the Wizengamot.

_And _there were going to be new professors, Zee had managed to push through a few reforms with Dumbledore off-balance, and Babbling had said Lyra could join the NEWT Runes class if she got her Runes and Arithmancy OWLs. Which she _had_, though the Examination Authority had made her come in to the Ministry to take them again, because they thought she'd somehow cheated the first time around — annoying, but worth it, just for the look on that stupid proctor's face when she met their demand for an arithmantic breakdown of the Colour-Changing Charm and raised them a comparison between the charm and an equivalent transfiguration effect. She'd read Babbling's publications, no idea why she was _teaching_ at _Hogwarts_, but she wasn't about to complain, the witch was a bloody genius. Lyra had never even _considered _anchoring wards in different planes until she'd seen the shadow-walking wards Babbling had written for Severus. (Though she had somehow overlooked that Lyra could shadow-walk, and therefore would be able to access the anchor-points anyway, didn't matter, it was still bloody neat.)

_Plus_ the Death Eaters were apparently trying to make a come-back, possibly independently of Wraith Riddle doing whatever kept waking Harry up in the middle of the night? It was hard to say for sure, no one had told Sev anything about the thing at the World Cup, and Lucy was being annoyingly cagey (even on a scale of Lucius Malfoy). Theo was _pretty sure_ his father had been involved in organising that little riot (which had been _fun_, they should do that more often), but neither Lyra nor Theo was a necromancer, so Cadmus wasn't exactly in a position to tell them anything about his plans.

Cissy (who'd spent the whole evening being a brat, and so hadn't been invited to play Aurors and warlocks with all the _fun_ people) thought it might have had something to do with his attempt to undermine her strategy with the Allied Dark, but she had bigger problems than in-fighting at the moment, what with a solid third of her bloc dead or captured in the riot. They'd talked about it when Lyra had introduced her to Emma, and she _said _she had a plan to deal with it and get the new coalition off the ground despite the setback. Lyra couldn't imagine _how _— she apparently _wasn't_ planning on pushing Lucy off the carpet, and he (_they_) had vouched for all of the marked Death Eaters who'd escaped Azkaban back in '81 and '82 by tagging along on Lucius's Imperius Defense. Cissy had just smirked at her like Walburga and said it was a surprise, she'd find out in the papers like everyone else.

Politics in her old universe hadn't been this interesting since...probably the early eighteenth century, and the situation was _bound _to spill over into Hogwarts eventually.

Before that, though, Emma was going to be making her debut as the first muggle to vote a seat in the Wizengamot in at _least _four centuries in...probably mid-September. Lyra predicted that...pretty much all of the Nobles would have a problem with that, and therefore with her, and probably Maïa, too — on top of retaliation from Dumbledore's supporters at all levels of society for her article at the end of last year. It was kind of weird how seriously everyone had taken up against Maïa, when she was arguably _far_ less responsible for the whole thing than Xeno Lovegood, but then, she _was_ a muggleborn, they probably thought that made her an easier target. Even _with_ the vassalage agreement in place, the papers had been full of speculation and opinion pieces absolutely _trashing_ the Granger name.

And the Blacks', of course, but it was kind of hard to smear _them_ given, well...faking someone's death for a few days was one of the _least_ ridiculous scandals they'd ever caused, as a House. There was that whole _war_ thing a decade or two ago, for example... Plus Sirius had only been cleared of all charges two weeks ago, so he was fucking untouchable at the moment, and someone — she wasn't sure _who_ — had actually floated the idea of giving Lyra herself a fucking Order of Merlin for her role in the World Cup riot...which was just...kind of weird. (She half thought Sirius might be behind it, playing some sort of obscure joke on her.) Not that she was complaining, just, she hadn't done anything particularly out of the ordinary. If anything, she'd kind of expected Dumbledore's allies to try to get her up on charges for using runic casting or destruction of public property or something, but apparently the circumstances were so _very _mitigating that she could've burnt down the fucking stadium and gotten a slap on the wrist if it'd helped capture the masked morons and save the Tánaiste.

Anyway, point was, the press and the public could hardly expect the Blacks to give a shite what anyone said about them at this point, but Lyra couldn't really _imagine_ the children of Dumbledore's followers wouldn't make their families' disapproval of everything to do with Maïa _very _clear over the next few months, which was going to be _great_, especially since Maïa's problems were now Lyra's problems _de jure_ as well as _de facto_—

She didn't think she'd ever been this excited for the end of a holiday.

They'd just come back to Britain yesterday. As far as she knew, no one even knew they were back, yet — she _had_ gone ahead and broken Dumbledore's monitoring charms after she'd caught up with Harry in California, because they'd already served their purpose by then, and it was none of his business what Harry was doing. And mostly because he'd annoyed her with his suffocating light magic aura dragonshite while they'd been discussing the fact that she would _not_ be returning Harry to his custody before the first day of term. Which meant—

"Lyra?"

"Yes, Blaise?"

"I don't know if you realise this, but you're flooding the room with magic."

Oh. Now that he pointed it out, yes, she was. Oops. Clearly thinking a little too hard about that particularly obnoxious tactic of the Esteemed Headmaster. But it wasn't like _her_ magic was light, it shouldn't bother Blaise. "So?"

"_So_, I can't pack with you being all distracting like this."

"You _do _know the Packing Charm takes all of ten bloody seconds, right?"

"Yes, but I don't want to pack _everything_, some of this shite is too small, or old, and some of this stuff is staying here instead of going to school. And as far as I know, there's no _Un_-Packing Charm, so..."

There wasn't, no. She could probably figure out how to do something like that, but it would definitely take more time than re-organising the trunks manually, since you'd probably have to be aware of exactly what was _in _the trunks and decide exactly what you wanted to do with each thing _anyway_... "_Ugh_, fine, I'll go find someone more interesting if you're so set on being _boring_."

Honestly, she still didn't know how it was taking him so long to go through his things, she'd been done with _her_ packing for _hours_. She flounced out of the room, bypassing Harry's door entirely, he'd already told her to bugger off — he was packing too, _and_ in a rotten mood because he'd had another Not-Professor Riddle dream-vision thing (which she still thought was _really fucking neat_, but he hadn't agreed) and had only gotten a few hours' sleep. Which, she didn't really see what the big deal was, but.

Zee was still in California, apparently she had a few final meetings to attend — business people, Lyra thought, or possibly the Future Late Mr. Zabini... Though, this one seemed to be relatively tolerable, given that they only saw each other, as Lyra understood it, a few dozen times a year — she wouldn't kill him until he started getting tedious, and since she hardly ever saw him, he would probably last a while longer than the others had. Which just left...

"_Siri!_ What are you doing?" she asked, stepping _around_ the wall between his room and the adjacent sitting room. Wasn't hard, he had the windows tinted and only a single candle lit, so practically the whole bloody room was shadows.

It _appeared_ that Sirius was doing _nothing_, just lying in bed staring at the flickering flame, a photo album lying abandoned at his feet, his diary on the desk beside the candle, as though he'd been trying to write, but gotten distracted _moping_ and just...given up on the whole day. Which was something she personally had never understood, but she'd seen _more_ than enough Blacks in this sort of mood — Arcturus and Orion were particularly prone to them — to know that there was absolutely _no_ point trying to get him to do anything interesting, or even get a rise out of him at the moment. Short of setting the house on fire, he simply wouldn't care. Which was really _very _inconvenient. She'd kind of been hoping she could drag him into the Madness with her, that night they'd gotten in a muggle fight and stolen a motorbike was _great_, and the World Cup riot was even better. They could have had an equally great last night before she went back to school. (Well, maybe not as good as the riot — seriously, she could understand, now, why Bella would've wanted to keep Not-Professor Riddle's war going indefinitely, if all battles were like that.)

Predictably, however, his response to her sudden appearance at his bedside was, "No. Go away," followed by a pillow pulled over his face, as though she would cease to exist if he couldn't see her. Which...there _might _be some kind of creature that that worked on, but it certainly wasn't her. On the other hand, being resolutely boring _was _kind of repellent.

"Ugh, fine. Be that way. The train leaves in twenty-seven hours, if you're still planning on coming to see us off. And you should shower and eat something at some point today."

She popped back over to Blaise's room to tell him to make sure Sirius did, in fact, shower and eat something at some point — looking after baby Blacks was her _job_, never mind that Sirius was technically older than her now — then returned to the bedroom she'd used last night to consider alternative activities. Maïa and Theo and Justin and pretty much all the humans she knew would, presumably, be packing and boring, the same as Harry and Blaise, or possibly _working_ and boring like Meda and (presumably) Emma. She _could_ go see if Sylvie wanted to go hunting, but the spiders had retreated to the heart of their territory after their failed ambush a few weeks ago, and hadn't started venturing out again yet. And she wasn't _quite_ overconfident enough to try taking on the _entire colony_ at once, especially when they had the home-field advantage. (Yes, she _could_ just set fiendfire loose at the centre of their webs, but that would end the game pretty damn thoroughly, and the wilderfolk and centaurs would probably drive her out if it went out of her control, which...control wasn't really the _point_ of fiendfire, so.)

Normally when she was this manic — she still thought the muggle term was a bit weird, but both Maïa and Blaise used it, insisted it was more specific than simply _mad_ — she would annoy Ciardha until he gave her some ridiculous theoretical warding problem to work out, or find someone to practice dueling with for a few hours. Once she'd intentionally picked a fight with Cygnus, spent a whole afternoon fighting him off, and then the better part of the night under various torture curses when he'd eventually managed to beat her down (and the rest of the week recovering from the effects of said curses — she _really _hated Skelegro). _Last_ time — the last time it was this bad, at least (there'd been a few less-dramatic up-swings over the course of the past few months) — she'd dragged Dora over to test the dueling wards she'd written for Zee, got to see what an Auror was capable of up-close and personal. Which was a lot of very painful, very incapacitating spells, and a degree of stamina which was frankly ridiculous, given that Dora _hadn't_ been in the same state of mind as Lyra herself. (Metamorphs were fucking cheaters.)

But Dora was off somewhere on the continent playing Black Cloaks with Moody. Which, she _could_ still pop in on them, it wasn't hard to find someone shadow-walking, and she knew Dora's magic well enough to orient herself without a clear idea of who she was pretending to be or what she was doing, she'd looked them up a few times since they'd taken up their ridiculous quest. But just lurking in the shadows wasn't really that much fun, and she _had_ to lurk because Moody _probably _wouldn't look to kindly on her shadow-walking _anywhere_, let alone into the middle of his 'case' — not that Bella was planning to let him get anywhere near _catching _her, but.

_Oh! Oh! _That was a _great_ idea! Bella! Bella would spar with her, she was almost certain of it, if only because she _definitely_ knew what it was like to be so _up_ that you were about ten seconds from ripping your skin off if you didn't _do something_, right _now_. (And if she could drag _Bella_ into the Madness, she would probably be even more entertaining than Mad Sirius.) Yes, she decided, already halfway to the Gate room and Château Blanc, this was a _great_ idea.

* * *

There was a shift in the atmosphere of the magic in the study Bella had taken for herself, distracting her from the letter she was composing. It was subtle, the currents of magic disrupted as though another mage's presence was affecting them, despite no other mage being present — most people, she suspected, wouldn't notice such an anomaly at all or, if they did, would consider it a natural fluctuation in the ambient magic. After all, this sort of fluctuation would normally be lost in the magic of the mage who was causing it, if an observer was aware of the flow of ambient magic at all, which was rare. _She _hadn't really been aware of it until she'd felt the change, but now that she _was_... The only explanation she could think of for that sort of shift, without the accompanying presence of the mage causing the disruption, would be that the mage wasn't entirely in the same plane of existence as Bella herself. There were a few adjacent planes they could theoretically be lurking in, close enough to create a pull on the ambient magic here, but only one of them was remotely convenient to access.

Someone was spying on her from the Shadows.

"Lyra, I know you're there," she said calmly, throwing her quill back into the ink-pot.

There were, of course, other creatures that lived in or passed through the Dark, but most other shadow-creatures affected magic differently than a mage standing (otherwise) just outside human perception. And it was comparatively easy to ward a semi-interrupted property like this one to _detect_ unauthorised shadow-walkers entering the vicinity (even if keeping them _out_ was a bloody nightmare). That would have alerted her if an unauthorised human or vampire or other sufficiently human-like Dark creature had stumbled upon her. No alert had been triggered, so it really couldn't be anyone other than her 'daughter' lurking just outside the boundaries of reality.

"_How_?" the girl demanded, stepping out of thin air into the middle of the room. Bella wondered if she realised how impressive that was — while not _impossible_, extrapolating from the basic principles of shadow magic to use other sympathetic traits to specify, relate, and travel between places was incredibly difficult, especially without having ever had the concept fully articulated and explained to one, which Bella doubted she had. Probably not.

"You're the one who was apprenticed to Monroe — are you telling me you _missed_ the tripline in the Shadows?"

"Not how did you know I was _me_, how did you know I was _there_? Eris says she didn't tell you, and you weren't using shadow magic, so—"

No, she hadn't been. She had, however, spent the better part of thirteen years sitting in a cell with nothing better to occupy herself with than endless hours of meditation and practicing wandless (and freeform) effects. She'd had time and reason to develop an acute sensitivity to the magical environment around herself. "That would be telling. What do you want?"

The girl pouted at her for half a second before skipping over to an armchair and throwing herself across it dramatically. "I'm _bored_. Entertain me!"

Bella snorted at the overly-petulant demand, and Eris's simultaneous response to the question of what Lyra wanted, which was _an immovable object to throw herself at for a few hours_.

_Ah, _that _sort of mood. _

Eris indicated her agreement, tainted with a hint of disapproval.

_Aw, don't you like it when we're mad? _It had been pretty clear when she'd been working on her escape that she didn't. Bella had gotten the impression that Eris thought she took too many risks with too little forethought when she was mad, even if she _did_ have more potential to cause chaos simply by existing. Which was, amusingly enough, more or less Tom's opinion as well. (Though he thought that mad twelve-year-olds interrupting delicate political meetings demanding his attention were the sort of problem that required an _immediate_ _solution _rather than just fucking hilarious.) _You know, Eris, you and Tom have more in common than you like to admit._

_Shut up. You are my least favorite Bellatrix._

_If lies make you happy, ducky._ All teasing aside, Eris wouldn't spend _nearly _as much time paying attention to her if she didn't like her, especially since Bella made a point of _not_ allowing her unfettered access to every corner of her mind. The goddess 'glowered' at her, annoyance flooding the connection between them, making Bella feel all warm and fuzzy. _Love you, too._

Unfortunately for Lyra, Bella was in the middle of something. "Go play with the kids, I'm busy."

"Kids are boring and too easy to break. Spar with me!"

_But kids are boring, and too easy to break_, Bella thought, smirking to herself. "What, you couldn't find anyone to play with in Britain, so you had to come _here_?"

"_Exactly_. Dora's over here trying to find you, so it's your job to play with me, now."

"Go play with the kids, I'm busy."

"You already _said_ that."

"I did, yes. Because I'm still busy. And they're werewolves, you're not going to break them." In response to Lyra's exaggerated pout, she added, "I'll come kick your arse for you after I've finished this letter."

If only because she'd implied she'd been sparring with an _Auror_ at some point before this summer, and now Bella was kind of curious how good a duelist she actually _was_. From her reaction to some of the memories they'd watched together, back on Walpurgis, she'd gotten the impression that Lyra wasn't really much of a fighter at all. By her standards, obviously — she'd be shocked if the kid wasn't unreasonably good for her age by the standards of anyone who _wasn't_ a professional warrior. She'd apparently held her own well enough in that little riot at the World Cup, after all.

"_Fine_." The girl tried to keep up her pout as she flounced off, but she'd have to try a hell of a lot harder than that to hide the fact that she was pleased from _Bella_, of all people. Even if she didn't know what she looked like when she was trying to keep a straight face, she _had _just agreed to give Lyra exactly what she wanted — to set herself against a vastly superior opponent and be beaten back despite her best efforts until she was too exhausted to think or move or even cast a fucking _lumos_... Though Bella wasn't entirely certain Lyra was conscious enough of that desire to articulate it, and she _highly _doubted she'd admit it aloud if she was.

When she caught up to the girl half an hour later, correspondence completed, she was on her back in the middle of an interior courtyard (one of the ones with dueling wards worked into the surrounding walls), at the bottom of a dogpile consisting of four preteen werewolves and two wilderfolk. Each of the children had taken a limb, while Harmonie and Mélodie licked her face and feet and poked their wet, canine noses in ticklish spots. Lyra seemed to be having trouble breathing, she was laughing so hard, but that didn't stop her struggling to escape. She managed to wrench a leg free, kicking and flailing. Darren, one of the younger boys, reeled back with a bloody nose, shaking his head as though slightly stunned by the blow.

"Erich, come help us!" Kiki shouted to one of the bemused onlookers, clinging to Lyra's right arm. "She's going to get away!"

"It is strange to think of you as a child," Mickey said conversationally, coming to join Bella in the doorway where she had paused, thinking more or less the same thing.

"I wasn't really much like Lyra when I was her age." Most people would probably say she had been, and yes, there were certain ways in which they were very similar, but Bella knew she had been _far_ more serious than Lyra. Far more controlled. She was fairly certain she'd never let anyone pin her to the ground and tickle her, for example — no one would have dared for one thing, and she'd never had time for..._playing_ anyway. Some of her seriousness was directly Tom's doing, of course, his compulsions guiding her away from such silly (annoying) childishness, but he'd also given her a purpose, a cause to work toward. Between her determination to become one of his Knights and her _need_ to defeat Cygnus and protect her sisters (and younger cousins, by then), she'd been far more _driven_ than Lyra.

"She seems a little... Is she okay?" There was actual concern in Mickey's tone, there. Bella looked up to face him, somewhat surprised.

"Of course. Did you never— No, I suppose you _wouldn't_ have seen me like this. This is normal, for us. For me in particular, but it does run in the Family as well. We're rather notorious for it. Tom... I learned to control myself, eventually." _Mostly_. Tom had helped her develop the occlumency skills needed to hold back the worst of the Madness (or trigger it) a year or two before the pack had joined the Death Eaters. There had still been occasional days or weeks when she'd been (at least to herself) noticeably more manic than usual — the idea to let the pack hunt her on the full moon had come to her in one such up-swing, as had several of her more productive thoughts on the nature of time. But it hadn't been terribly out of character for her to challenge _all _of her recruits to attack her at once, and she never _had _had particularly regular sleeping habits. It wasn't surprising that Mickey wouldn't have noticed her acting much out of the ordinary.

Lyra managed to free both arms and a leg, rolled to her feet with a small child still clinging to her left ankle, and was immediately tackled from behind. Bella was fairly certain she heard the snap of a wrist, but none of the children fell back in pain. Must have been Lyra. Sure enough, a few seconds later, Erich, the oldest and largest of the attackers, and the one responsible for the flying tackle a moment before, realised what had happened, started pulling the others off, apologising and offering to fix it as the others assumed various expressions of contrition.

"I've got it." Lyra grimaced, straightening the fracture and muttering an incantation, wriggling her fingers once the purplish-orange glow faded from her arm. "Are we done, then?"

Erich exchanged an uncomfortable look with his fellow werewolves. "Er...I mean..."

"We didn't have to _stop_," Lyra scoffed. "It's not like it was something _important_."

"You're..._sure_ she's okay?" Mickey asked, still sounding unwontedly concerned.

"You've seen me walk off _far_ worse injuries in training." Hell, he'd _given_ her worse injuries than that and she'd _still _managed to kick his arse after.

Erich seemed to spot the two of them, then. He ducked his head and came slinking over like he'd done something very wrong. "I'm sorry, Bella, I didn't mean to—"

Lyra, who had followed him, smacked him in the back of the head with her recently mended hand. "Why're you apologising to _her_?"

Bella snorted. "Because you ignored his apologies, and mothers are supposed to get protective when someone hurts their offspring."

"It's not like that wrist hasn't been broken about two dozen times by now. And you're not my mother." Erich gave her a rather confused look — Clarence and Lena had decided, after the first time Lyra had visited, that it would be easier to tell the children that Lyra was Bella's daughter than to tell them the truth. "And Dru wouldn't care either. And also, I already fixed it, stop groveling." The last bit was obviously directed at the boy, who muttered something like _er, yeah, okay...I'm still sorry, though_ before retreating to join the other kids, all of whom had become rather subdued in the wake of the tragedy that was an accidental broken wrist. (Bella had seen young Death Eater recruits acting rather similarly more times than she could easily count, unnerved by having dealt another person a serious injury for the first time — it was never _not_ vaguely amusing.) "So, sparring?"

"Yeah, alright. Hey, you lot, clear the yard!"

Lyra skipped back out to the centre of the open space, shooing the wilderfolk off toward the colonnade on the north side of the square. Most of the others had headed that way as well, there were benches there for spectators. Once the last of them were clear, Bella engaged the dueling wards. They were fairly old-fashioned — designed to simply tank any spells or physical effects that came into contact with them, channelling the energy, whether magical or kinetic, away into the ground until it lost coherence — but strong enough to withstand anything short of an Unforgivable. Bella followed, stretching as she went.

"Knives and wands, to knock-out or yield," Lyra suggested, bouncing on her toes, as though she couldn't physically stand _still_. Which...she probably couldn't.

"No, first we're going to establish what you're capable of, and then we'll go until I decide you're done." Mostly because she was _intimately _familiar with Lyra's current state of mind, and well aware she couldn't be trusted to judge her own limits at the moment. Bella did have a meeting in about two and a half hours, but she didn't really doubt she could wear the kid out before then. She charmed a circle into the ground around herself, about two feet in diameter. "Eris said you wanted an immovable object to throw yourself against, so. You try to make me step out of the circle, by any means necessary. Just don't throw Unforgivables at the spectators."

Lyra grinned. "I _knew_ this was a great idea!"

"Are you waiting for a starting cue?" Bella smirked, flicked a banishing charm at the girl, flinging her across the courtyard, not quite forcefully enough to hit the wall behind her, but certainly hard enough to knock her out if she'd hit her head rather than rolling over her shoulder and popping back to her feet, a flaying curse on her lips.

Twenty minutes of near-continuous casting later, the girl stopped dead in her tracks. "How the _fuck_ did you— You can't block the Cruciatus, I _know_ you can't!"

No, and she couldn't dodge, either, without stepping out of the circle. She gave her 'daughter' a mocking grin. "Space-warping spell."

"But..._how_? That sort of shite isn't anything _near_ battle-castable!"

"Not traditionally, no. But I presume you're familiar with Chati's Paradox?" Lyra nodded. "Yes, well, incantations and wand motions are every bit as arbitrary as language. Once the effect is reified and you fully understand how and why it works, abbreviating the casting process is relatively trivial." _Relatively _being the key word — spells affecting the nature of time and space were among the most difficult to fully grasp, and therefore the most difficult to reduce from a two-minute incantation to a brief series of syllables with no other meaning than the essence of the desired effect. Of course, channelling enough magic to make it work within the much shorter casting time was well beyond the capacity of most mages (as she and Tom had discovered when they'd started trying to teach it to the others), but that only made it even more astonishing to anyone who happened to see it.

The girl opened her mouth as though to object, then closed it, staring as though Bella had just smacked her across the face with a fish. "That is _fucking _brilliant."

"It is, isn't it. Am I to take your resorting to Unforgivables to mean you've run out of ideas?"

Lyra pouted at her. "_Maybe_."

"Are you sure?" She hadn't tried any truly creative methods, like creating a rift beneath Bella's feet or transfiguring the ground to a frictionless substance or setting a shield-based vacuum around her. (Not that any of those would have worked either — she'd been playing this game twice as long as Lyra had been _alive_, and Tom always had been more devious than her.)

"It's boring when you just _stand there_!"

Bella shrugged lightly, cancelling the charm that delineated the circle. "Well, I thought it only fair to let you get a warm-up in." She smirked, casting a series of cutting curses, followed by a broad-angle stunning charm and a progressive transfiguration that created a miasma of flue gas, its casting hidden in the recovery from the sweeping stunner.

As intended, Lyra missed the miasma, spinning out of the way of the cutting curses and shielding against the stunner, grinning. Bella gave her an opening to counterattack. She _was_ somewhat rusty, still — even the ritual she had done to restore the years and strength she'd lost in Azkaban couldn't entirely reverse the effects of sitting around letting her skills go dull for a decatriad — but she wasn't so out of practice that Lyra would be able to go on the offensive if she didn't. The girl took the opportunity to cast a _very_ competent fractal lightning curse. Easily blocked, however, with a conjured copper net which she then banished at the girl, forcing her to leap aside, off balance from casting an Egyptian Heart-Rotting Hex, which Bella sidestepped smoothly, positioning herself to summon the net directly into Lyra from behind. She declined to follow up, just to add insult to injury.

Lyra stumbled, growling in frustration, used a freeform vanishing to get rid of the copper wires that had tangled around her arms and torso. Unless Bella was very mistaken, she was beginning to feel the effects of the carbonyl miasma, because that was _unwontedly _clumsy of her. She threw a False Avada just as the girl straightened again, the spell striking _right _over her heart.

"Dead," she announced, followed by the counter to the flue gas transfiguration, just to mop up anything Lyra's vanishing hadn't taken out.

"What the hell was _that_?" Lyra demanded, wiping green paint off her muggle vest. She dropped her wand to her side, taking a breath of fresh air and shaking her head as though to clear it.

"The practice avada, or the poison gas I just countered?"

"_Practice_— Wait! You _gassed_ me?! _How_?"

"Flue gas — colorless, odorless, it's easier to detect the ongoing miasmic transfiguration than the gas itself. It was part of my opening volley. The False Avada is a conjuration designed to have the same casting requirements as the Unforgivable, so my recruits didn't accidentally murder each other."

The girl simply pouted at her. "Again."

Bella shrugged, made an open-armed _what are you waiting for_ sort of gesture.

Fifteen minutes later, Lyra had been stunned, paralysed, 'killed' three more times, disarmed and trapped under half a dozen various shields she'd been unable to break without a wand, and buried up to her waist in the briefly-liquified ground of the courtyard. From which position she was currently glaring at Bella and trying to find some way to release herself, as Bella lazily countered her every attempt to soften the soil or escape into the Shadows or Apparition Space.

"I'd yield, if I were you," she said, smirking openly at the girl, who was growing angrier by the second.

"_Ignis infernalis!_" Lyra spat instead, demonic flames racing across the ground between them.

Bella cackled. "Playing with fire are we, now?" she _tsked_. "Didn't we learn our lesson about that summer we burnt down the nursery?" That was a bit of an exaggeration, she hadn't actually _burnt it down_, but she _had _accidentally set a curtain on fire, which had spread to engulf half of the room before Lil had realised that five-year-old Bella had been _entirely too quiet_ for almost three minutes and come to put it out. It was a safe assumption Lyra had done something similar at some point in her own childhood.

She cast the same spell herself, the monsters and demons of her flames falling upon Lyra's until they became an indistinguishable mass of heat and rage and dark magic, over which the two of them fought for control in a perverse sort of tug-of-war.

Lyra _was_ stubborn, Bella would give her that, but imposing her will and maintaining control over...anything, really, hadn't ever come naturally to her. Even with magic, she had a tendency to guide it, rather than _force_ it into the shape she needed (which was half the reason Lyra's casting was so sloppy). And Bella had a _lot_ more practice, what with the two decades she'd spent in various positions of command. Slowly but surely, she pushed the flames back, circling them around the girl, still half-buried in the floor of the courtyard.

"Face it, darling, you're outmatched." A tiny red-orange dragon snapped at a wayward curl, vaporising it as a cockatrice lunged at her nose. "I _will_ burn you, you know."

Lyra hesitated, either wondering if Bella meant it (she did) or whether she'd be able to come up with some way to free herself before she passed out from the pain (judging by the results of her efforts thus far, she wouldn't). "Fine! I yield!"

Bella pulled the fire back before breaking her hold over it — allowing the magic to leach out of the flames — and casting a condensing charm to bring a wave of water out of the surrounding air.

Lyra sluiced her singed hair back out of her eyes, even angrier now than before. "You're holding back!" she snapped. "Playing with me."

"I am, yes." It was rather more entertaining than she'd expected, too. The last time she'd done something like this, it was with Cissy — she'd been sixteen and getting overconfident, destroying the cocksure little Death Eaters too often. Though, of course, Cissy had had the good grace to accept the lesson after a single demonstration. Lyra...not so much. (Though that was _hardly _unexpected.)

"_Stop it!_ Stop being all careful not to hurt me and just—" She cut herself off, apparently uncertain where she was going with that sentence. "I expect this kind of shite from Dora. Not from _you_."

Bella grinned. "Oh, well, why didn't you say so?" She checked the time. "I have to get cleaned up for a meeting with Solange Martin in just over an hour. If you're still conscious by then, you can come," she offered. Not that Lyra _would_ be conscious at the end of this little session, but giving her a goal would keep her more focused.

She set a timer to count down even as the girl's eyes lit up. She nodded eagerly, rage gone in an instant in the face of something new and exciting to look forward to, probably thinking that there was no way Bella would be able to wear her down to the point that she actually passed out in a single hour — being manic always felt unstoppable like that. "Let me up, first, though."

"Hmm, no, I don't think so." Lyra opened her mouth to protest, but all that came out was a gasping sort of moan as Bella hit her with a vicious disarming charm, wrenching her shoulder from its socket as well as her wand from her hand. She _did_ let her keep her knife, not that it would help her much. "Do you know how many spots there are on a human body that you can put a piercing curse _without_ killing someone?" she asked, taking a seat cross-legged on the ground, just out of Lyra's reach.

A giddy grin spread across the girl's face, even as Bella cast the first curse, putting a finger-width hole through her left pectoral, just nicking the outside of her second rib. Lyra gasped, a half-laughing, entirely disbelieving sort of sound. "You— _Fuck_, Bella! Ow!"

"Of course, it's actually easier to list the spots you _can't_ put a piercing curse without killing someone, if you're willing to heal them immediately, you know." She cast a sizzling dark healing charm at the wound. Lyra gasped again as the pain suddenly vanished. "But then, if you think about it, healing them is cheating." She pierced the same spot again. "Cauterising helps, too, and that's _not_ cheating," she informed the girl, tweaking the next piercing curse - through her left bicep - to sear the flesh as it passed. That was followed by one between the ulna and radius of her recently mended left wrist, fracturing both of them again, and then, because Lyra was a skinny bitch and there weren't _really _a lot of places to poke holes in her without hitting _something_ important, one low in her left lung that left her coughing blood, her right hand pressed tight over the wound.

"I– I'm not sure I like this game..." she muttered, a smile twitching at her lips, the giddy excitement which was their experience of fear warring with shock, Bella expected.

"You literally _just_ told me to stop holding back," Bella pointed out. "_Exsercio_."

That particular healing spell, like the space-warping transfiguration effect she'd demonstrated earlier, had had, in its original version, a much longer, more complex incantation. It was, in fact, considered by many to be the epitome of dark healing spells, the sort of thing that could be used to repair a body damaged even unto the point of death, assuming its soul was able to channel the necessary magic — the caster only supplied the _intent_ — and its mind was able to withstand the shock and pain which were the 'cost' of the spell (magnified, of course, by the decreased duration of casting). It was physically, mentally, and magically exhausting, the sort of thing that was normally used as a last-ditch effort to save those critically wounded in battle, or restoring torture victims, the healing its own form of punishment.

It _certainly _wasn't the sort of thing one casually threw around with the sole _intent_ of exhausting someone, but it did work better than almost anything else when it came to wearing her down in the middle of an episode of the Madness. That was the whole reason Tom had decided it was worthwhile to abbreviate in the first place.

Of course, the more seriously she was injured _before_ being healed, the more the healing would take out of her. Bella's plan _had_ been to beat the shite out of the girl a few times, forcing her to heal the wounds between beatings. _She'd_ never lasted more than four rounds of that before she'd passed out, mad or not, and she knew better than Tom exactly which injuries were most taxing to heal.

Lyra gasped, blinking against the pain, clenching her (bloody) teeth to avoid screaming, panting slightly as the spell concluded. When she managed to catch her breath again, she glared furiously at Bella. "Just because I don't want you to– to fucking _mock_ me being all careful not to hurt me doesn't mean I want to just sit here and take whatever you feel like throwing at me!"

Bella pouted at her. "No one ever lets me have any fun," she said, before reverting to a more serious tone. "There is no practical difference between this and me _not going easy on you, _you realise." If she stopped _giving_ Lyra openings and used more serious spells, she'd end up on the ground cursed to nine hells and in need of serious healing before she could offer any sort of resistance.

"Yes there _is_, I can fight back!"

"You really can't. I may be out of practice and even aside from the Madness, you're very good for fourteen, I'll grant you that, but killing a handful of idiots who didn't know the difference between their wands and their dicks doesn't make you _competent_, and getting your first taste of battle madness doesn't make you _me_." Increased speed and stamina, perfect timing, and an unnatural awareness of the magic in use around her (all of which the girl _should_ be experiencing at the moment, anyway) could only do so much, _especially_ in a one-on-one fight — the potential for the efforts of multiple attackers to be turned against each other, exploiting the inherent chaos of the battlefield, was arguably more useful than the adrenaline-fueled sharpening of her own skills. "Word of advice, darling: don't let earning yourself an Order of Merlin for that little fit of pique at the end of the riot go to your head. We both know you'd be dead if Lovegood hadn't stepped in and saved your sorry arse."

Lyra, who had appeared to be on the cusp of objecting for the entirety of her little speech, clearly hadn't expected that last point, her expression shifting from rage to scorn and annoyance. "Don't be stupid, they're not really going to give me an Order of Merlin, and how do you even _know_ about that?"

Bella actually had to laugh at that one. "You may not have noticed, but most people don't give a flying fuck _why_ you do something like trapping scores of violent idiots in a position to be easily arrested. Even if they _did_ know that you did it to express your frustration over the battle effectively being _over_, they still wouldn't care." At least, Bella assumed that was why she'd done it, to hurt the bastards who'd started the riot and then couldn't hold up their end of it properly, letting it come to an end all too soon. "Or at least, they wouldn't care about that _nearly_ as much as they would about the outcome. Which _does_ look pretty fucking heroic, especially given that they think you're _my_ daughter. And I have my sources."

The girl glared at her, annoyance only intensifying. "Zee told you. But she wasn't there, either."

Yes, it had come up in the course of her complaining about having to deal with Bella going through her volatile teenage years _again_, this time _without_ Tom's compulsions acting as a stabilising influence on her personality. Apparently Lyra had fucking terrified her, losing her temper with Narcissa as she had during the riot. She'd legitimately thought Lyra was going to lose any semblance of self-control entirely. Which...Bella would have been _extremely_ annoyed if Lyra actually _had_ hurt Narcissa, but she also understood how incredibly frustrated the girl must have been, what with her obligations repeatedly delaying her participation in the first proper _battle_ she'd ever been anywhere near. As she'd pointed out to Zee, the closest thing she could compare it to would be going to the Revel and trying to resist joining in the orgy because _other people_ insisted she ought to value monogamy.

Zee had pouted at her, bitching about how Blaise wasn't nearly this much trouble, and Bella _could_ make some effort to help with the parenting of her younger self, or at least _managing_ her, but no matter how she might deny it, Zee was obviously perfectly capable of handling the situation.

Plus, there was a reason Arcturus had left her with Cygnus. She hadn't realised it until she'd been analysing her memories with the advantage of her current perspective, but it was fairly clear the Black Patriarch had decided early on to sacrifice Cygnus to the cause of raising her. It had been obvious from the moment he'd found out about her dedication that Bella _was_ eventually going to win their contest of wills. She almost certainly wouldn't have become nearly as formidable a witch without an adversary to pit herself against for her entire childhood, one which she was capable of resisting and eventually overcoming — because if she hadn't, she would almost certainly have eventually broken, and he didn't _want_ his heir _broken_, only trained to a shape he could work with. But if _she_ didn't break, her designated enemy would have to, and the balance of probability had held that she would destroy him when he did. Placing herself in a similar position relative to her younger alter-ego simply could not end well for anyone.

(Zee, unlike Bella, had always had a knack for resolving situations without directly opposing anyone, and so was hardly in danger of locking herself into the same sort of existentially defining conflict with Lyra.)

She gave Lyra an agreeable hum. "Yes. She got it from Sirius."

The girl scowled. "You know that both of you fucking Zee is basically the same as you fucking Sirius, right?"

It _really_ wasn't. Sirius was an angsty, self-righteous little bitch, and their history consisted entirely of her acting as his protector, or else punishing him for his teenage rebelliousness (which had gone about as well as she imagined her attempting to _manage_ Lyra might go). She actually _liked_ Zee.

"You can make as many Black incest jokes as you like, but you're not changing the subject, here. You obviously have some sensitivity to the magic in use around you, but you haven't been using that awareness to your advantage, so I can only assume you don't know how. If you _did_, you would have caught the flue gas. Plus your casting is sloppy and if you're using an avoidance-heavy technique, you really should learn not to signal your movements with your body language — that's why you keep walking into False Avadas." It went without saying, Bella thought, that her spell repertoire was far too narrow to truly keep up, if she moved away from standard battlemagic and the torture spells Cygnus had favored.

The girl crossed her arms, glowering, as though attempting to set Bella on fire with a silent, wandless spell. "My casting is not _sloppy_," she muttered after a moment — clearly the only point she thought might be open to debate.

"It really is," Bella informed her, resisting the urge to poke another hole in the kid for her impertinence. _She's not a trainee, Bella..._ (It wasn't as though she even particularly liked teaching, she just hated being surrounded by incompetence _all the time_, and Lyra wasn't actually _incompetent_, anyway, even if she wasn't as good as she could be.) "Challenge Cissy to a Venetian-style exhibition duel sometime."

Not that Cissy's casting was particularly sharp, she just had a ridiculous knack for using the waste energies that tended to accumulate over the course of a duel to produce unexpected effects, casting apparently random spells alongside more standard dueling fare until they combined with her opponents' sloppiness to explode in their faces. It was incredibly weird, Bella still had no idea how she did it — _she_ couldn't do that sort of arithmancy on the fly — but it was a very neat trick. The Venetian dueling wards had elements built into them to help spectators visualise such extraneous magic, which in a competitive duel would be taken into account in the scoring.

Lyra, in her easily distractible state of mind, dropped her glower to ask "_Why_?"

"Because you could learn a thing or two?" Bella rolled her eyes, handing Lyra her weird American wand back, silent permission to find some way to excavate herself. "I don't know how she does it, by the way. I assume it's some weird Lovegood talent."

"How she does what?" A few softening charms loosened the dirt packed around her legs, before she pushed herself out with a sort of freeform banishing charm and attempted to remove the soil still clinging to her muggle shorts with an obscure sweeping charm.

"That would be telling. And the spell you use to vanish ash from the floo would work better."

The pout returned. "You know, if you didn't want to play with me, all you had to do was say so."

That was just... Really? "That is the _biggest _load of hippogriff dung... I do _know _you, you know. Fuck, I was an annoying kid." Honestly, the more time she spent around Lyra, the more sympathy she had for Tom and Walburga.

"_Whatever_. What are we meeting with Solange Martin about?"

"Excuse me, _we_?"

"Hey, I'm still conscious! You said I could come if I was conscious."

"You decided you didn't want to play that game, that bet went along with it. Besides, you were never going to be at that meeting."

Lyra grinned, slipping through her shadow and stepping out of Bella's, on the other side of her body. Show off. "How are you going to stop me?"

She sighed. "I know you're not going to go home if I ask politely."

"Nope! So what are we meeting with Solange Martin about?"

"Excuse me, _we_?"

"You already said that!" Lyra giggled.

"Yes, because you're still not invited. I _will _knock you out if you don't drop it." Establishing a diplomatic relationship with the Martins — who were among the most prominent, most outspoken neo-Gemeenschoppists in France — would _not_ be made easier by Lyra's presence. At the moment, Bella was still gathering intelligence on the movements of various Resistance groups across the continent, but the eventual plan was to begin coordinating their efforts, which necessitated the support of local leaders like Solange and Emile. It would be difficult enough to negotiate the issue of her own identity and history without her slightly mad 'daughter' making a nuisance of herself.

Not to mention, revealing her _own_ identity to them was a relatively small risk, should they decide to betray her rather than allying with her. She was already a notorious war criminal, wanted by Britain for various acts of terrorism committed in the war (not to mention the people she'd killed in the course of her escape), had committed murder in two different ICW member states in the past month, and performed an _incredibly _illegal blood magic subsumation ritual in one. It hardly _mattered_ if anyone knew _she'd _been speaking to the likes of the Martins. Lyra, on the other hand, was a mostly-respectable member of the British nobility (and soon-to-be member of the Order of Merlin) who _really _shouldn't let it be known that she and Bella were in contact with each other, let alone meeting with anti-Statutarian activists together.

"_Ugh_, fine! I'll go bug Cissy, then!" Lyra snapped, flouncing off toward the nearest doorway leading back into the building, apparently to make an exit — slamming a door _was_ somewhat more emphatic than vanishing into the Dark, she supposed.

But... Did she _really _think Bella believed that? It _was_ possible that she _would_ go annoy Narcissa for a bit, but Narcissa was equally likely to have business to attend to, and both the Wizengamot hall and the Ministry buildings had wards to alert security if anyone attempted to shadow walk into or around them. Unless she was at home, it would be much more difficult for Lyra to just drop in on her. Though Bella honestly suspected she wouldn't even try, just find something to amuse herself for an hour or two, and then come find _Bella_ again, accidentally-on-purpose interrupting her meeting and inviting herself to stay. After all, she would already _be _there, might as well. And then she would smirk and Bella would be stuck putting up with her because they both knew she wouldn't curse Lyra in front of a potential ally — that would undermine the whole "my reputation for being a fucking savage is _highly _exaggerated" tone she was aiming for.

That was what _she_ would do, at least. She had, in fact, twice, before Tom invented a way to prevent her from doing so.

"_Go the fuck to sleep_," she incanted, tracing a rune into the air between them and pushing it at Lyra's back before she could escape. Not that she knew what was coming. She managed to turn halfway around before it reached her, her eyes going wide with surprise in the brief moment before it rendered her unconscious, giving Bella plenty of time to cast the far more complicated element of the spell — a time dilation effect, modified to affect the mind, while leaving the body (mostly) untouched.

It wasn't _perfect_, the after-effects were similar to the worst hangover she'd ever had — disorienting, mind-numbing, and vaguely nauseating — on top of a migraine and the effects of a minor magical backlash, but it did what it was designed to do. Which was knock her out and leave her unconscious through the most elevated period of a bout of the Madness. The time dilation was dependent on her state of mind to function — she was almost certain the migraine-backlash bit was due to that part of the spell failing when she started coming down to something approximating her usual state of mind, subjective days or weeks later, though she never noticed the time passing — the knockout part of the spell rendered her entirely unconscious for about twenty hours. Which meant Lyra should wake up... Probably a few hours before she was meant to be on the Hogwarts Express.

It was hardly Bella's problem, in any case — her meeting with Solange was in Nice. The intervening hours would give her time to enchant an amulet to obscure her presence from Shadows so Lyra wouldn't be able to track her down so easily, and she wasn't likely to get back _here _until tomorrow afternoon, by which time Lyra would be somewhere in Scotland.

_She _is _going to be _very _annoyed with you, you know. _

Bella _did_ know. 'Go the Fuck to Sleep' might actually edge out the Imperius on the list of spells she absolutely _hated_. She was half-convinced Tom had never addressed the after-effects as incentive for her to learn to control herself rather than be subjected to it, and the Imperius was really very easy to break, all negative associations aside.

_Yes, well, she's welcome to try to _make _it my problem, but in the meanwhile, I have things to do_. And by the time Lyra managed to catch up with her, she would almost certainly have gotten over it.

* * *

Lyra woke with a start, wrenching herself into a sitting position, her wand in her hand, before she managed to get her eyes to focus on the dark, unfamiliar room she found herself in.

There was a man asleep in an armchair off to her left — or rather, a man who had been woken by Lyra's own startled awakening. "Lyra?"

"Mickey? W'happened? My head feels like nifflers," she grumbled. All..._fuzzy_ and like something had been digging around in it. Did that make sense? Did it even come out as actual _words_? She didn't really care. _Eris, did I blow myself up again?_

If she had, she didn't remember it. She didn't remember much of _anything_, honestly, just...she'd been sparring with Bella — and that was a _terrible _idea, why had she thought _Bellatrix_ would be fun to try to fight? And then... She was pretty sure there was some talking? She definitely didn't remember blowing herself up, though. It also didn't really _feel_ like blowing herself up — the magical backlash, yes, but more...hollow and empty and...kind of post-Walpurgis-y (except Eris was still there). And also sick, as though she might vomit. And her head was _pounding._

_Ah, no, Bella knocked you out._

Right. It was coming back to her now, Bella had been going to meet with Solange Martin, and Lyra had said she'd go visit Cissy, then, and then... _That fucking _cunt_! She cursed me in the back!_

_Yes, she did_. Eris sounded far less furious than Lyra really thought she ought to. More exasperated than anything. _Well, you _were _going to follow her._

_Yeah, but she didn't _know _that! You didn't tell her, did you?_

_No. It's more interesting if you don't scare the Martins away from her little alliance, but not enough to ensure your absence from the meeting. She says she just knows you, and also stop being a baby. _

_That— _Lyra had no words, so Eris was treated to an inarticulate wave of fury (which did nothing to alleviate her headache).

"Bella said this would help," Mickey said, passing a potion vial to her. _He _sounded somewhat amused, though he did a pretty good job keeping a smile off his face, his brow furrowed slightly in concern.

Lyra gave the thing a suspicious glare before snatching it out of his enormous hand. It smelled like a hangover potion, but she wasn't entirely certain she wanted to trust _anything_ Bella gave her at the moment. Or ever again.

_She says yes, it is a hangover potion, and you'll be fine in a couple of hours._

_Yeah, maybe, if she's not _lying_, the traitorous bitch — but in the meanwhile I feel like _shite_, and where the fuck does she even get off cursing me in the fucking back?! _

She poked a finger in the vial and tasted it to check before actually taking it and letting herself collapse back onto the bed.

"How are you feeling?" the werewolf asked.

_Slightly murderous_. "Like someone cursed me in the back." Though the headache had started to fade almost immediately on swallowing the potion, so that was something, she guessed. She cast a _tempus_, wondering how long she'd been out, because this room wasn't underground, and it was _definitely _morning when Bella had cursed her. If it was this dark, it _had_ to be...six in the _morning_? She cast the spell again, wondering if she'd fucked it up somehow, because that was...twenty-one hours or so. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been unconscious that long, especially under the Madness — even stunning spells and the like wore off after an hour or so. "What the fuck _was_ that?"

Mickey shrugged. "She calls it _go the fuck to sleep_. I think de Mort invented it. I was surprised to see her use it — the only time I saw him use it on her, she tried to stab him for it."

_Eris, tell Bella she's a hypocritical bitch for me. Because she is _such _a hypocritical _fucking _bitch! I can't believe her! What the actual _fuck_!_

Eris didn't have anything to say in response, which was fine, because it was mostly rhetorical, anyway — though she wasn't kidding about telling Bella she was a fucking bitch. Seriously, using a _binding spell_ of some kind to _keep her unconscious_? _And_ it had fucked with her head somehow, now that the headache and nausea were clearing up, it felt like she'd been out for a week, somehow, like she was feeling all hollow because she was coming down from the Madness, when she'd just been going into it. She couldn't really say _how _she knew that, because under the hollow _bleh_ she mostly felt the same as she had earlier, just, she _knew_ this was the down-side of the whole thing...somehow. It was _incredibly disorienting_. Not to mention _infuriating_.

_Bella says you're welcome to try to stab her, and yes, sleeping through the worst part of the Madness _is _the point of the spell._

_What?!_ That was just... How dare she! Making a point about fighting her being a terrible idea was one thing (and even that had been reminding her of Cygnus a bit, _especially_ when she'd refused to let her up and disarmed her and started poking holes in her), but fucking around with Lyra's mind like that... That was a very different thing, and Lyra was going to go ahead and say it was _not_ okay. Not even a little bit! Obviously she wasn't going to try to _stab_ Bella, Bella would probably fillet her if she did, but she was definitely going to do _something_...

"Are you okay?"

She glowered at the overgrown werewolf. "Of course I am. Granted, I'm not particularly pleased with Bellatrix at the moment, but..."

He gave her a strange sort of smile, she couldn't really parse it, and didn't care enough to try. "It's okay to hate her, you know."

_Well now that I have _permission_..._ Though it was kind of weird for _Mickey _to say that. Or at least, she...thought it was? "Aren't you two friends?"

"...No. Comrades, yes. But not friends. Closer to family, I think, and family can be complicated."

Lyra had nothing to say to that. Well, aside from the fact that it made sense, then, that Bella had said she'd've given Lyra to Mickey to raise, if she was _actually _her daughter. Even if _she_ didn't think of _him _as family — which, Lyra was pretty sure _family_ meant something different to the House of Black than it did to the giant muggle werewolf — Bella was _obviously _comfortable with the werewolves the same way Lyra was out in the Forest with Sylvie, and he probably would have treated Lyra like a niece or something (and one he actually _liked_, at that). "Did she tell you that you're supposed to have raised me?" she asked, as it occurred to her that no one had confirmed that she had.

He nodded gravely. "Lena was _not_ happy to learn that Bella and I fictionally shared a child."

Was... Was that a joke? Even if it wasn't supposed to be, it was probably the funniest thing she'd heard Mickey say at any point since she'd met him. Funny enough to tease a smile from her, even feeling as shite as she currently was. "Somehow, I'm not actually surprised that at least one of my foster parents fucking hates me, just on principle."

Lena had avoided Lyra almost entirely, but in their brief passing interactions (mostly after Bella finished removing the scars Cygnus had left on her back, last time she was here), she'd gotten the impression the alpha's wife was...weirdly soft for a werewolf. She'd've gotten over it, if Lyra had grown up with the wolves, she was almost sure. Especially since she had joined the pack well after Mickey left Britain, so theoretical baby Lyra would've been there first. And even if she hadn't, she still probably would've liked her better than Dru.

Mickey nodded again. "You are a very easy person to hate."

Okay, _that_ was probably the funniest thing he'd ever said. Well, it was mostly in the delivery, because she was sure it was true, the list of people who occasionally wanted to torture her was longer than the list of people who didn't, after all (_she_ currently wanted to torture _Bella_, even), but. She was barely able to keep enough of a straight face to say, "Why, Mickey, that hurts — you hardly _know_ me!"

"You are more like Bella than she thinks you are," he said simply, giving her a tiny shrug and an even smaller frown. "Though as your fictional foster-father, I think I should advise you not to try to stab her for using that spell on you. Even if that _is _what she would do." Her irritation must have shown on her face, or something, being reminded of Bella's treachery, because he added, "Because it is unfeasible, not unwarranted."

"Oh, I know I can't take her in a fight," Lyra assured him, considering her options. "I knew that _before_ I came here, actually, that was kind of the point. But..."

An idea was beginning to take shape, thinking on people who wanted to torture her and the incident at the end of last year. She might not be able to get anywhere near hurting Bella in a fair fight — she hadn't managed to land a single curse, earlier, even when Bella had just been standing in one spot _mocking_ her — but she could almost _certainly _set up an ambush for her. She still had a few hours before she had to go back to Britain, and Bella wasn't likely to come hunt her down for revenge at bloody _Hogwarts_. Especially if she limited it to something _really inconvenient_ and fucking _humiliating_, rather than actually _harmful_. By the time they ran into each other again (which would be a good long time, if Lyra had anything to say about it), she would almost certainly have gotten over it.

"But?" Mickey prompted her.

She gave him her most devious smile. "Tell me, Fictional Foster-Father, where does Bellatrix sleep?"

* * *

_As for what Lyra does to Bella, well... We have to do the actual plot-relevant summer scenes first, so this little incident probably won't come up until chapter five or six in **THAT WAS PART OF THE PLAN**. Which we're actually going to start publishing...next week? It'll probably be a few weeks between chapters, but yeah, SEQUEL, WOO! We'll post chapters here and on AATP to let you know when it goes up, but after that you'll need to move to following the new story. Or just follow us instead of the individual stories. Whatevs. —Leigha_

_Because we've been working on summer scenes, and me my solo projects, while much of the necessary planning is done for fourth year, we don't actually have much of a buffer. ATM, the first and fourth chapters are done, the second is...half-ish, and the third is barely started. Especially with my insomnia and Leigha's work going into busy season soon, yeah, might be delays as we get stuff sorted out. —Lysandra_

_This thing will be re-posted soonish in a more reasonable order than 'oh, well, that's what I felt like working on today, so that's what's done, here, have a thing' so keep an eye out for that, if reading these chronologically or organised by sub-plot (or both, probably both) is something you're interested in._

_Also, those of you who've read Mary Potter know that I like to make PDF versions of full stories available for anyone who wants them, so I'm working on a PDF version of AATP (with a few minor corrections for continuity, typos, etc.). If you want a copy, PM me. Make sure to include your email, and if you're on FFN, MAKE SURE YOU LEAVE SPACES or spell out 'at' and 'dot' so the stupid site doesn't cut out the address. Eg: 'your_email gmail . com' OR 'your_email at gmail dot com'. —Leigha_

* * *

_The scenes were reordered chronologically by sub-plot on 5/20/2020. —Lysandra_


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